How to Read a Solar Street Light BOQ
A solar street light BOQ should list every physical item that has to arrive on site: luminaire, panel, battery, controller, pole, foundation or base, battery enclosure, cabling, connectors, fasteners, tools and spares. Read it line by line and check three things — whether each component is separately described, whether quantities and units match the site schedule, and whether anything the installer needs has been left out. A BOQ that hides the system behind one lump-sum row cannot be compared, priced properly, or inspected.
What the BOQ is for
A bill of quantities is a quantity statement, not a product brochure. Its job is to let every bidder price the same scope and to let the site team count what arrives. When a BOQ is written as a single row — “solar street light, 8 m, complete” — the quantity is clear but the scope is not, and the difference between two bids will sit entirely inside that row. The first task when reading one is to expand it until every item that can be lost, broken or substituted has its own line.
Line-by-line anatomy
A complete BOQ for a split solar street light normally contains the following, each with its own unit:
| Line | Typical unit | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| Luminaire | no. (set) | Delivered lumens, power, beam angle, IP/IK, colour temperature |
| PV panel | no. plus Wp | Wattage, cell technology, dimensions, mounting bracket included? |
| Battery | no. plus Ah / kWh | Chemistry, nominal voltage, usable capacity, housing included? |
| Controller | no. (set) | MPPT or PWM, current rating, IP, remote or app access |
| Pole | no. (set) | Height, shape, wall thickness, galvanizing, bracket and arm |
| Foundation / base | no. or m³ | Concrete, rebar, anchor cage, excavation — who supplies and pours? |
| Battery box | no. (set) | Buried or pole-mounted, IP, locking, ventilation |
| Cabling | m | Cross-section, insulation type, UV rating, spare length |
| Accessories | set | Fasteners, glands, connectors, earthing, labels, tools |
The “system” line hides what you are buying
Many supplier quotations collapse everything into one row per pole. That is convenient for pricing but useless for comparison, because the line cannot be checked against a specification and cannot be inspected at shipment. A single raw material price change — say the battery moving from a 60 Ah to a 50 Ah unit — leaves the total untouched while removing a fifth of the storage. Ask for the BOQ to be broken down to at least the level in the table above, and treat any refusal to break it down as a risk flag rather than a formatting preference.
Quantity and unit mismatches
The commonest BOQ errors are arithmetic, not commercial. Check these before anything else:
- Header quantity against the line-item quantities. A scheme of 120 poles that adds up to 118 in the detail rows will surface as a site argument two months later.
- Components per pole against components total. If each pole takes one luminaire, one panel bracket and two cable glands, the totals should be 120, 120 and 240.
- Metres of cable per pole against the route length. A 60 m run feeding one pole and a 8 m drop to the battery box are not the same quantity, and neither includes the slack that installers actually need.
- Units written loosely. “Panel 1 set” and “panel 1 pc” price differently if one includes the bracket and the other does not.
Missing lines to look for
Items absent from a BOQ are in effect free to be omitted from the shipment. The usual casualties are the panel mounting bracket and its hardware, the arm or spigot that joins luminaire to pole, foundation anchor bolts and templates, the battery enclosure and its ventilation, DC isolators, fuses and surge devices, earthing rods and conductor, cable glands and UV-resistant ties, anti-theft fasteners, spare fuses and a spare controller, and commissioning tools or the plug needed to read the controller. For an all-in-one design the list is shorter but the mounting interface, the battery internals and the remote or app pairing still deserve their own lines. See all-in-one versus split solar street lights for how the mechanical scope changes with the format.
Read the description column as a specification
The description column is where quality is won or lost. “Battery, lithium” is not a description; “LiFePO4 12.8 V 100 Ah, IP66 enclosure, BMS with low-temperature cut-off” is. Once the description is that specific, the BOQ doubles as the inspection checklist: the inspector counts the physical items, reads the labels and compares what is in the crate with what was written in the row. If a row cannot be physically verified at the factory, it is probably too vague.
Tie the BOQ to the drawings and the price schedule
A BOQ on its own rarely travels well. It should reference the specification clause numbers, so a reader can follow any row back to the requirement it satisfies, and it should share its line numbering with the priced schedule so that bids can be compared row by row rather than by headline total. Once the rows are numbered, normalising quotations becomes mechanical — see making solar street light quotes comparable.
How we can help
We are a China-based trading and project sourcing company, not a manufacturer. We review specifications and BOQs, match a product and configuration to your site conditions, source from qualified manufacturers, and manage quality through to pre-shipment inspection. If you are preparing a tender or specification and want a second opinion, contact us.