Homeowner Blog

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.

Electricity prices are going up roughly 5% this July. For most households that means a bigger bill and not much else. But if you have solar, a rising electricity price works in your favour - in two ways that most payback quotes completely ignore.

Solar installations in the UK are about to get more expensive, regardless of the taxpayer funded subsidies arriving at the start of 2027. Three policy changes and one market shift are converging in the same few weeks. Two of the policies are designed to make solar more affordable, but in practice they will push prices up for anyone paying out of their own pocket.

The right solar panel for a UK home depends on your roof, not on a ranked list.
A standard pitched tiled roof calls for maximum efficiency per square metre; a shaded roof needs back-contact cell technology that handles partial shade without losing a third of its output; a small roof may need a high-voltage panel just to turn the inverter on in winter. Spirit Energy's design team specifies panels based on roof type and constraints first, and across more than 6,000 installations across England, that approach is what separates a well-performing system from an average one.

China's Ministry of Finance announced on 9 January 2026 that the country would scrap export VAT rebates across a long list of products from 1 April. Solar panels lost the rebate entirely. Battery products had theirs cut from 9% to 6%, with the rest scheduled to disappear on 1 January 2027.

TL;DR GivEnergy was, for a long time, one of the most recognisable names in UK home battery storage. So when news broke in early April 2026 that the company had filed a Notice of Intention to Appoint Administrators, it sent a shockwave through the industry.

TL;DR On 12 March 2026, Ofgem officially granted Tesla a full retail electricity supply licence. Tesla Electric is coming to the UK. Anyone can sign up - you do not need a Tesla car or a Powerwall. But the more Tesla hardware you have, the more the system works in your favour. Powerwall owners can realistically reduce their annual electricity bill by £700 or more, and earn additional income through a Virtual Power Plant - before Tesla Electric has even launched, using tariffs available today.