If you look up your car charger, or your solar panels, on the official list of tested equipment and find nothing, you have not found a problem. You have found the edge of what the list is for.
Here is the one fact that explains it. The list only covers equipment that sends electricity back out into the network. Anything that does has to be tested in a lab first — above all, to prove it shuts itself off the instant the power goes out, so it cannot keep a cable live while an engineer working on it thinks it is dead. Things that only use electricity are never on it, because there is nothing for them to be tested for.
We hold every device on that list — 9,279 of them, from 343 manufacturers — and we have built the only search over it that gives each device a permanent web address of its own. Which makes us the last people who should let you misread it.
The proper names, now that you know what they mean: the list is the Energy Networks Association's Connect Direct register, and the safety rules it tests against are called G98 and G99.
"Is it on the list?" is four different questions
| What you are buying | What we hold | What the list covers | If it is not there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plug-in solar | 31 devices | The whole device | Genuinely significant — under SI 2026/848 it is the test |
| Home batteries | 3,430 devices | The grid-interfacing inverter only | Usually nothing |
| Rooftop solar | 4,606 devices | The inverter | Nothing at all, for a panel |
| EV chargepoints | 17 devices | Bidirectional (V2G) units only | Nothing whatsoever for an ordinary charger |
Only the first row is a legal test. In the other three, the register is useful evidence about one component of a system, and an empty search result is very often a statement about the register's scope rather than about the product.
No solar panel is on the list. Not one, from any maker.
A panel produces DC and cannot connect to anything on its own. The device that faces the grid is the inverter, so the inverter is what gets type tested and the inverter is what appears. Search a panel model number and you will get nothing back, every time, for every brand.
We nearly published the opposite. One manufacturer looked like the exception — 21 rows on the register under a brand we knew for panels. On checking each row, all 21 were that company's inverters, listed under the same corporate name. Had we not looked, we would have implied that one manufacturer's panels are tested and everyone else's are not, which would have been false about every other manufacturer in the country.
No battery is on it either — only the box it plugs into
The storage side of the register lists the grid-interfacing device — the inverter or the all-in-one unit that contains one — and not the cells behind it. One well-known storage manufacturer holds over a hundred rows and not a single one is a rack-mounted battery module; searching the module part numbers across every storage row on the register returns nothing at all.
So a stack of modules that does not appear is unremarkable. An all-in-one unit, which has an inverter inside it, generally does appear. If you are checking a battery system, the thing to check is the hybrid inverter or the all-in-one enclosure, and asking a seller for the battery's register entry is asking for something that does not exist.
An ordinary car charger can never be on it
This is the one where a naive reading does real damage.
A normal chargepoint is load. It draws power and never sends any back, so it is never type tested for grid connection and it is not the kind of device the register describes. We checked every one of the 9,279 rows we hold: none of the mainstream UK chargepoint brands appears, and that is exactly what the rules predict. It is not a gap in their paperwork.
Only vehicle-to-grid chargepoints — the bidirectional ones that can push a car battery back into the house or the network — export, and so only those are measured. There are 17 of them on the register for the whole of Great Britain, which is a small enough number to be worth a piece of its own.
An ordinary chargepoint is governed instead by the Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021 — default off-peak charging, randomised delay, security requirements — which is a register we do not hold and a different question entirely.
Four answers we can give you. Only one of them is bad news.
When we say something about a product and the register, it is one of four things, and we try never to blur them:
- Matched. We tied this product to a specific entry on the list, and we show you its reference number so you can check it yourself.
- Not on the register. We looked, in a category where the register covers this kind of equipment, and found nothing. This is a finding.
- Not applicable. The register does not cover this kind of equipment at all — a bare panel, a battery module, an ordinary chargepoint. This is not a finding and we will never render it as one.
- Unmatched. We could not tie the product to a row. This is a statement about our data, not about the product. Retail names and register names drift systematically: one manufacturer's register entry reads "Compact 460W" and sells at retail with a 515W panel specification; another's model is sold under a URL with a different wattage in it. "We could not match it" means exactly that and nothing more.
The one thing on the list that is bad news, and exactly what it says
Every row carries a device status. It is the most consequential field on the register and the easiest to misread, so here is ENA's own wording, taken from a device page, under a heading noting the status is "assigned by ENA appointed evaluators":
Compliant — "This device has been assessed by ENA's engineers and has been deemed acceptable for use by Distribution network operators"
Non-compliant — "This device has been assessed by ENA's engineers as non-compliant. Distribution network operators are unlikely to accept this equipment on their networks"
1,514 of the 9,279 devices we hold carry the non-compliant status, spread across every category.
That is a large number, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not mean.
It is not a failed test. Every device on the register shows a completed full G98 type test, whichever status it carries. The status is a human assessment by ENA appointed evaluators sitting on top of the test data: passing the test and having the submission accepted are two different steps, and the register reports the second. A non-compliant device has still been through the test.
It is not a statement that anything is illegal, banned or unusable. ENA's claim is narrower and more specific: network operators are unlikely to accept the equipment on their networks. We repeat that claim and not a stronger one.
It moves. One manufacturer's status changed within days of being listed. Any status we show carries the date we read it, and links to ENA's own entry.
It is ENA's assessment, not ours. We hold no view of our own on any manufacturer's equipment here, and where we do record a verdict on a product it is a separate field, separately attributed, and not derived from this one.
How to check something yourself, in about thirty seconds
The ENA's own interface is a JavaScript application with no shareable URL for a device, which is why we mirror it. To check something:
- Ask for the reference number of the exact thing you are buying. It looks like
UKSOL/21008/V1/A4. Its formal name is the System Reference, and almost nobody in the shops uses that phrase — which is exactly why asking for it gets you a straight answer instead of a brochure. - Check you are asking about the right component. For a kit, the kit may be registered in its own right, or the inverter inside it may be registered separately by its own manufacturer. These are different entries and only one of them is what you are buying.
- Search it on our register, which covers all 9,279 devices across every category, or on the ENA's own Connect Direct platform.
- Read the row, not the headline. Registered capacity, the G98 or G99 version tested against, the publication date.
- If it does not match what you were told, ask the seller to explain it before you buy — not after.
What the list cannot tell you
The register is an equipment register. It says nothing about who fitted your system, whether it was notified to your network operator, or whether the installer holds MCS certification — and for rooftop solar it is MCS, not this, that a supplier asks for before paying you an export tariff. For heat pumps there is no ENA entry at all, because a heat pump consumes electricity and exports none.
MCS is therefore the register that would turn several half-answers on this site into whole ones. It is not published under a licence that permits republication, so we have written to ask. Until they answer we would rather show you one register honestly than two badly.
Related reading: what the ENA register is, and why it decides whether your kit is legal, and seventeen bidirectional chargepoints for the whole country.