Do Solar Panels Affect Your Home Insurance?

Nobody rings their insurer about a new dishwasher, so plenty of people have solar fitted and never think to mention it. This is the one piece of admin after an install that genuinely earns ten minutes of your time, because the question is not really whether your panels are insured. It is whether your roof still is.

Tell them, and get it in writing

Almost every UK home insurer requires you to disclose a material change to the building, and a permanent array bolted through the roof covering counts as one. The good news is that most policies cover roof mounted panels under the buildings section as standard, and a lot of insurers will not move your premium at all. Solar is ordinary now in a way it was not ten years ago.

What you are protecting by telling them is the claim you have not made yet. If an insurer first learns about an undeclared install while assessing storm damage or an electrical fault, they can question the whole claim rather than just the panels.

Ring them, then keep the written confirmation with your install paperwork. Ask them to confirm two things: that the panels are covered, and whether the premium changes.

Your rebuild figure has probably gone up

This is the part people miss. Buildings insurance pays to rebuild, so the sum insured needs to reflect what is actually attached to the house. A system of 12 panels with a 10 kWh battery starts from around £7,770, and if your sum insured was set before the install and never revised, you can end up underinsured across the entire policy, not just the solar. Some insurers then settle claims proportionally, so a shortfall on the sum insured becomes a shortfall on every payout.

Worth asking: does the figure cover the cost of refitting the array and the scaffolding to do it, or only the hardware?

Where cover tends to get thin

Storm and fire damage to a roof mounted array is usually included in a standard buildings policy. Three things commonly are not.

Accidental damage is often an optional add on rather than standard cover, and it is the one that matters for solar. A cracked panel is far more likely to come from someone’s ladder or a dropped tool during gutter work than from a gale.

Panels that are not on the main roof may sit outside the main buildings cover, or under a much lower limit. That includes ground mounted arrays and anything on a detached garage, outbuilding or carport. Ask directly if that applies to you.

Theft is the awkward one. An inverter or battery in a garage may fall under contents rather than buildings, with its own limit and its own conditions about locks and security.

A battery needs its own answer

Where the battery lives decides how it is treated. A unit in a garage, utility room or loft is a different conversation to one mounted outside, and insurers vary on which section of the policy it belongs to.

Tell them the capacity as well. Batteries in the 5 to 60 kWh range are stackable and the figure genuinely matters to an underwriter. The reassurance to offer is that the installation is MCS certified and the battery is fitted to the manufacturer’s clearance and ventilation requirements, which is the substance behind any question about fire risk.

Keep the paperwork they will eventually ask for

An install takes two to three days, and the paperwork that follows is what proves the job was done properly: your MCS certificate, the electrical installation certificate, the DNO notification, the handover pack and the product warranties. Insurers ask for the MCS certificate more often than anything else, and so does a buyer’s solicitor if you sell.

That is the simple case, where you own the system outright. If a property has a legacy rent a roof lease on it, where a third party owns the panels, the lease needs reading properly before either an insurer or a mortgage lender is comfortable. Systems bought and owned in the normal way avoid all of that.

None of this is a reason to hesitate

Declared properly, solar is a well understood addition to a house. With grid electricity around 24p per kWh and export paid at roughly 12p, a system that pays for itself in five to eight years and generates for twenty five or more is a sensible thing to own. It just belongs on your policy schedule rather than as a surprise for a loss adjuster.

If you would like a straight answer on what a system would cost on your own roof, and the paperwork you would be handed at the end of it, our survey is free and there is no obligation.