Plug-in solar is legal now. Is it worth it?

You can now buy a solar kit off a shelf in Screwfix, stand it in the garden, and plug it into a socket. No installer, no scaffolding, no roof.

That has been normal in Germany for years. In this country it was against the rules until the end of August. Regulations came into force on 27 August 2026 creating a legal route for small plug-in systems in England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland runs its own network rules and has not changed them.

Kits are turning up in Screwfix, City Plumbing and Argos from around £336, and around 70 of them were on the approved list when the rules landed.

So: is it worth bothering with? Here is the honest version.

The rules, in one table

What	The limit
Inverter output	800VA
Current into the socket	3.5A
Total panel capacity	2,000W DC
Panels	up to 4
Devices per household	1
Telling the network operator	within 28 days

Two more things that matter. The kit has to be on the Energy Networks Association list of compliant products and carry CE or UKCA marking. If it is not on that list it is not legal to connect, whatever the seller tells you. And it is one device per house, so you cannot buy three and line them up along the fence.

Go past any of those limits and it stops being a plug-in system. It becomes a proper installation with a proper grid application, which is a different job.

What it actually saves

An 800W kit makes somewhere around 500 to 800 units a year in this country, depending on which way it faces and what is shading it.

The catch is that you only save on what you use at the moment it is being made. There is no export payment on these and no battery in the box. Power you generate at 1pm with nobody home goes back to the grid for nothing.

Government analysis put a typical saving at roughly £70 to £110 a year. On a £336 kit that is a payback of three to five years.

Where you land depends almost entirely on one thing:

• Somebody home during the day, or a workshop, or a fridge and freezer doing the work: self consumption runs 60 to 80% and you are at the good end.
• House empty from nine to five: self consumption drops to 30 to 40%, and so does the saving.

If you are out all week, a plug-in kit is a slower payback than the adverts suggest. Nobody selling them will lead with that.

The bit that catches people out: the socket

Here is the part we care about, because it is the part that comes back to us.

These kits end up outside. Garden, garage roof, shed, fence. Most houses in Hereford do not have a proper outdoor socket, so people improvise, and the improvisation is where it goes wrong.

Do not run it off an extension lead. Not a trailing lead, not a reel, not through a timer or a travel adaptor. It goes into a fixed socket. Eight hundred watts pushed back through an old extension lead sat out in the rain is exactly the sort of thing we get called to after it has already gone wrong.

What you want is a weatherproof, RCD protected socket, ideally on its own circuit. That is ordinary outdoor power work and it is not a big job. Our callout is £90 including the first hour, then £50 an hour, and we tell you the price before we start.

Worth a thought too if your house still has an older fuseboard with no RCD, or a garage fed off a spur somebody added decades ago. Before 800W starts feeding back into that, it is worth somebody looking at it. An EICR from £250 covers the whole installation and tells you where you stand.

The form you have 28 days to send

This one gets missed.

Once the kit is switched on, a G98 notification has to go to your network operator within 28 days. For Herefordshire that is National Grid Electricity Distribution.

You do not need permission first. That is the point of the change, and it is what makes these different from a roof system. But telling them afterwards is not optional, and it is on you rather than on the shop that sold it.

We submit these alongside our solar work anyway, so if you would rather not deal with it, we can do yours.

One thing the marketing gets wrong

They are being sold as balcony solar, because that is what they are called in Europe.

The first compliant kits in this country are mostly not balcony kits. Argos and UKSOL both say so about their own range. The ground mounted versions need ballast to hold them down, and that is usually sold separately, so the kit that arrives is not always the finished article in the photo.

Check what is actually in the box before you buy.

When to skip it and do the roof properly

If you own the house, the roof faces anywhere near south, and it is not sat under a sycamore, a plug-in kit is a small answer to a bigger question.

Eight hundred watts is about a fifth of a normal domestic array. A 4kW system is the size most Herefordshire houses end up at, and solar and battery storage at a home are zero rated for VAT until 31 March 2027. That relief is worth £1,000 or more and it is not coming back.

A plug-in kit makes real sense if:

• You rent, and a roof system was never on the table
• The roof is shaded, north facing, or due to be recovered soon
• You want to try solar for £336 before spending thousands

It makes less sense if you own a decent south facing roof and you are using the kit to avoid a conversation you could just have.

Not sure which one you are?

Send a photo of the roof, or of the spot in the garden where you were thinking of standing it, and the socket you planned to plug it into. We will tell you straight which of the two is right for your house, and if the answer is the £336 kit, we will say so and you can go and buy one.

We cover Hereford and the county, we are NICEIC Approved, and we would rather give you a useful answer than a doorstep appointment.