About DIY Solar UK

DIY Solar UK exists to answer one question honestly: can you install solar panels yourself in the UK, and is it worth it?

Almost every "solar advice" site in the UK is run by an installer or a lead-generation company. Their goal — understandably — is to get you to fill in a quote form. That means the advice is quietly shaped around one answer: hire us. Nobody with a sales team is going to tell you that a competent DIYer can put a 4kW system on the roof for a third of the installed price.

We will. This site is built for people who are comfortable with tools, willing to learn the regulations, and want to keep the £3,000–£5,000 that would otherwise go to an installer.

What we cover

• Practical how-to guides — from roof mounting and wiring to choosing an inverter and adding battery storage.
• Honest kit comparisons — our best DIY solar kits and inverter roundups, with sortable spec tables so you can compare on price and quality yourself.
• The boring-but-critical bits — DNO notifications (G98/G99), Part P sign-off, grants and 0% VAT, and the Smart Export Guarantee.
• Free tools — a savings and payback calculator to sanity-check the numbers before you spend anything.

Our editorial stance

We only recommend kit we'd genuinely buy ourselves. Where DIY isn't the right call — a steep three-storey roof, a listed building, no time to project-manage — we say so plainly, because a botched install costs far more than a professional one.

We are not MCS-certified installers and we don't sell installations. Nothing here replaces a qualified electrician for your final connection or a structural engineer for your roof — solar involves working at height and with high-voltage DC, both of which can kill. Treat our guides as a well-researched starting point, not a substitute for professional sign-off where the regulations require it.

How the site is funded

DIY Solar UK is free to read and carries no intrusive ads. We keep the lights on through affiliate partnerships: if you buy kit via our Amazon links or switch energy supplier via our Octopus Energy referral, we may earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you. It never changes the price you pay, and it never changes our recommendation. Full details are in our privacy & affiliate disclosure.

That's the whole model: genuinely useful, independent advice, funded by the tools and kit we'd point you towards anyway.