Multi-plot projects

When your KMZ has multiple plot boundaries, SolarLayout designs each plot independently and in parallel. A 4-plot project usually takes about as long as the biggest individual plot — not 4× longer.

Why split a site into plots

Two common reasons:

• Your site is naturally divided. Power-block-sized sub-areas, parcels acquired separately, terraced terrain, or land where internal exclusions split the boundary into segments.
• You want to compare layout options across sub-areas. Plot 1 at one set of parameters, Plot 2 at another, to see how each performs.

If you don't need separate plots, a single boundary polygon is simpler. See KMZ requirements for how to structure plots in Google Earth.

What you'll see during generation

When you click Generate layout on a multi-plot project, a status bar appears across the top of the canvas:

• It reads Run in progress… and shows how long ago the run started.
• A progress bar tracks the elapsed time.
• A Cancel button and a View details option sit on the bar.

The status bar shows the run's overall progress — it does not break the run down plot-by-plot. There's no per-plot list while the run is going, and after a run where every plot succeeds the Inspector shows no breakdown either — just the finished layout on the canvas and the Generate layout again button.

A per-plot breakdown only shows up when a run finishes partially, is cancelled, or fails. In that case the Inspector shows a one-line summary (for example 5 of 6 done in 3m 20s — 1 failed) with a caret you can expand into a list with one row per plot — labelled Plot 1, Plot 2, … in the order they appear in your KMZ — each marked done (with its time), failed, skipped, or interrupted. On a cancelled run, a plot that was still computing when you hit Cancel reads interrupted, while plots that hadn't started yet read skipped.

While the run is going, the status bar across the top of the canvas carries the overall progress; once every plot has finished, the bar goes away and a small Loading layout… chip sits in the centre of the canvas while the result loads. Per-plot status isn't marked on the plot boundaries on the map.

After a plot finishes

As plots finish, the status bar's progress continues toward completion. The full layout doesn't appear on the canvas yet — it appears once every plot is either done or failed and the per-plot outputs have been merged into the project layout. When every plot succeeds, the Inspector shows no summary line — just the Generate layout again button.

If a plot fails partway through, the run keeps going on the rest. When the project finishes, the Inspector shows a summary line you can expand — e.g. 5 of 6 done in 3m 20s — 1 failed — and expanding it reveals each plot's row with its own done time (and the failed one marked failed).

Re-running after a failure

Per-plot re-run isn't available yet — to re-try a failed plot you click Generate layout again in the Inspector, which re-runs the whole project. (A future release will add per-plot retry.)

If you want to tweak parameters and re-try, change them in the Inspector first, then click Generate layout again. The next run appears in the Runs list as a new entry — your previous result stays on file.

How plot results combine

When every plot finishes, SolarLayout aggregates the per-plot outputs into a single project layout:

• Total DC and AC capacity — sum across plots.
• 25-year energy yield — reported at three configurable exceedance values (P50 / P75 / P90 by default), computed at the project level on a merged hourly profile.
• PDF report shows per-plot tables plus a project-level summary.
• KMZ, PDF, and DXF exports are produced at the project level — one file per format covering the whole project.
• The 15-minute energy CSV is a single project-level time-series file. It's only available when the run used a custom hourly weather file you uploaded; runs that pull weather from the built-in API have no CSV.