Solar Builder

The solar builder takes a job from an address to a priced, wired system design. It is one screen with six steps across the top, a map in the middle, a tool rail down the left, and an inspector on the right that changes with the step.

The six steps

The first step is optional. The location usually arrives with the job — a rep opening a design from a door they just knocked, or from a lead already in the CRM, has answered it before the tool opened. A skipped quick proposal never colours as outstanding and never holds anything up.

Nothing else is locked either. The steps report whether their work is finished; they do not gate navigation. If you have placed panels and then spot a wrong pitch, jump back to 2D design, fix it, and come forward again. The status line says so: "Ready — nothing is locked; go back any time to fix a pitch."

The tool rail changes with the step

The rail only ever offers the tools that mean something on the step you are on. The quick proposal has one; the 2D design has ten. A tool shown dimmed is one that is not built yet — it is left visible so the shape of the finished rail stays honest rather than quietly missing.

The roof locks once you start placing panels

From System design onward the roof stops being editable, even though the arrow tool is still there. Seven interactions switch off together: dragging a corner, sliding a wall, moving the building, nudging a roof-line junction, turning a slope arrow, inserting a corner, and the hover highlight that advertises all of them.

This is deliberate. Nudging a wall while placing an array silently invalidates work that has already been checked, and the failure shows up much later in a production number nobody can trace back. Go back to 2D design to edit the roof; the lock lifts there.

Undo, escape, and getting out of things

• Escape abandons whatever is half-done — a part-drawn outline, an open run of roof lines. It is bound at the window, so it works wherever the pointer is, but it is never stolen from a field you are typing in.
• ⌘Z / Ctrl+Z undoes; ⇧⌘Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z redoes. One gesture is one entry, so undoing a wall drag undoes the whole drag rather than a hundred mouse moves.

How your work is saved

Two layers, answering two different questions.

The draft is what is on this screen right now. It lives in your browser, is written constantly, and costs nothing. It is what protects you from a closed tab or a dropped connection.

The save is this is a version of the design worth keeping. It happens when you finish a step, when you move into the 2D or 3D views, and whenever you press save — and it is what produces a revision you can reopen later.

Once a save succeeds the local draft is cleared, because two copies that disagree are worse than one that is behind. A failed save keeps the draft, which is exactly when it matters most.

A design is not saved until it is worth saving

The first save waits for two facts: where it is and what they use. Without a location the design cannot be reopened to anything, and without a usage figure the bid is an empty form rather than a quote. Everything else — surname, account number, meter number — is genuinely optional at the door, and demanding it would refuse to save the exact conversation the tool exists to capture.

Once a design exists it keeps saving whatever happens to it. Clearing a field never orphans a row that has already been reopened or handed to somebody else.