Homeowner Blog

Britain will see its deepest solar eclipse in decades this evening, with as much as 96% of the sun blocked by the moon in parts of the country, the closest the UK has come to totality since the total eclipse over Cornwall in 1999. The dip lasts around two hours and will barely register on a typical home solar system's annual output, since the effect behaves much like a passing bank of thick cloud. It matters far more to the national grid than to your roof, which is why Octopus Energy is running a UK wide power down session between 6pm and 8pm tonight.

The battery is usually the single most expensive part of a solar and battery installation, and the right size depends on one thing: your average daytime electricity usage once overnight and EV charging are stripped out. As a rule, undersize if you're unsure how your usage will change, since storage can be added later but never removed. Oversize only for a genuine power cut reserve or a confirmed future load like a heat pump. 

This image was AI-generated.
Plug-in solar panels up to 800W became legal to connect to a UK plug socket on 15 April 2026, and the rule allowing a certified kit to go straight into that socket without an electrician takes effect on 27 August 2026. As of today (31/07/2026), no plug-in product has actually been certified yet, so nothing branded Lidl exists on a shelf today. The numbers are worth knowing regardless: the legal maximum plug-in kit generates roughly 640 to 760 kWh a year, against around 3,400 to 3,800 kWh a year from a typical 4kWp rooftop system in southern England, a four to six times difference.

South-facing solar panels produce more electricity per panel than east or west-facing ones, but east-west systems often produce more electricity overall, and the daily generation profile can be a better match for how most households actually use power. Whether south-facing is "better" depends on what kind of roof you have and what you are trying to achieve.  For many homes, the most useful answer is that neither orientation is best used exclusively. 

The installed price gap between the Tesla Powerwall 3, Sigenenergy SigenStor, and Fox Evo is under 4% when measured on cost per usable kilowatt-hour of storage. Spirit Energy has installed all three, including the first Powerwall 3 commissioned in the UK, and the honest conclusion is that price alone should not drive this decision.

Spirit Energy now installs solar and battery systems for homeowners anywhere in the UK, not just within two hours of its Reading base. The only thing that changes outside that radius is who physically carries out the survey and installation: a local technician, vetted by Spirit Energy, rather than one of its own in-house teams. Design, specification, contract, warranty and aftercare all stay with Spirit Energy regardless of where you live.

Every one of Spirit Energy's 6,000-plus installations since 2010 has had a technical and structural survey carried out by one of its head electricians before any panel goes up. The survey is where a £10,000-plus, 25-year investment is either set up to succeed or quietly compromised. This is what a proper one actually checks, based on a live survey at a new build home in Reading, southern England, audited on the day by no other than GaryDoesSolar.

The fastest way to improve your solar panel payback period is to maximise generation per square metre of roof, because the panels themselves are only about 5 to 10% of total system cost. The labour, scaffolding, and inverter stay roughly the same whether you fit a modest array or fill the roof, so the real question is not how cheap the panels are but how much electricity each metre of roof can produce. Get the design, the installer, and the post-install setup right and a well-configured system can repay itself in six to seven years in southern England.

A solar installer was fined £120,000 in December 2024 after a worker slid off a roof adjusting panels and broke his femur - the company had provided no edge protection. The job involved moving nine panels. The HSE found the work at height had not been properly planned. This is not an isolated case, and it tells you something important about how to evaluate any solar quote you receive. 

The right EV charger for a solar household depends less on brand loyalty and more on three things: which battery system you already have (or are getting), whether your home has a single or three-phase supply, and how much you care about design. Spirit Energy has installed solar and EV charging systems across more than 6,000 UK homes, and the question of which charger to pair with panels comes up in almost every conversation once a customer has an EV or is planning one.