Homeowner Blog

The Sigenergy SigenStor is a modular home battery system that combines a solar inverter, a battery inverter and energy management in one stacked unit, with up to six battery modules giving a maximum of 52.56 kWh of usable storage per stack. Its biggest strength is flexibility, because you can mix module sizes and add storage years after installation.  Its biggest catch is that the inverter rating is fixed, so the one decision you can't easily change later is the one to get right first.

The AIKO Neostar 3 and the LONGi S10 are two of the most advanced home solar panels sold in the UK, and at 495W there is very little between them. AIKO is slightly more efficient per square metre (24.8% against 24.3%), while LONGi loses less output in heat and offers an identical 30-year performance guarantee. On most UK roofs, either panel gives you the same system size, so the better choice depends on your roof's heat, shading and layout rather than the brand.

Shade reduces solar output in steps rather than gradually, because a single shaded cell on a standard panel can switch off a third of it. On most UK homes the cheapest fixes are design decisions that cost nothing: mounting panels to suit the direction the shadow runs, and putting shaded panels on their own inverter input. During testing, micro inverters recovered 40 to 50% of the output lost to shade, so they are worth fitting only when that extra generation pays back comfortably inside the warranty period.

Ofgem granted Tesla Energy Ventures an electricity supply licence on 11 March 2026, making Tesla the only home battery manufacturer in Great Britain that can also sell a household its electricity (Octopus is releasing a home battery soon too!). The hardware has moved with it, and a three-phase Powerwall went on sale in Germany on 23 April. A Powerwall is the way into all of it.

Your MCS certificate should reach you within 30 days of your system being commissioned, and without it no supplier will pay you for exported electricity under the Smart Export Guarantee. That deadline sits with MCS rather than with your installer, and it applies to certified domestic installations across the UK. The month after commissioning is when the certificate, the grid paperwork and the export application all need to happen, and none of the three is automatic.

Every solar and battery system comes down to three parts: the panels, the battery and the inverter. Everything else is cabling and optional extras. A typical UK home system with a battery costs somewhere between £9,000 and £14,000 at today's prices and usually pays for itself in around seven years, after which it carries on generating for decades, as the systems Spirit Energy installed in 2010 are still doing.

These nine mistakes account for most of the money lost on a UK solar and battery installation, and nearly all of them are made at the quotation stage rather than on the roof. The most expensive is fitting fewer panels to bring the price of a quote down, because the panels themselves are only around 5 to 10% of the total cost of the job. Spirit Energy has designed and installed these systems since 2010, and the same errors still turn up in the quotes homeowners bring in for a second opinion.

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.