Homeowner Blog

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.