Since 27 August 2026 you can buy a solar panel, plug it into an ordinary socket at home, and lawfully use the electricity it makes. That is genuinely new, and it is the reason plug-in solar suddenly appeared in shops.
What almost nobody selling one will tell you is that the new rules are narrow, and that plenty of what is on sale sits outside them. Outside does not mean banned — it usually means you cannot just plug this one in; it needs an electrician — but that is a very different purchase from the one people think they are making.
So we looked at 23 sellers offering 63 plug-in solar products in the UK and checked each one against the rules and against the official list of equipment that has been independently tested. Four things came out of it.
What the new rules actually require
To be something you can simply plug in, a kit has to tick four boxes:
- It makes electricity from sunlight. Not wind, not anything else.
- What it puts into your home is 800 watts or less. That is the inverter's output, not the number printed on the panels — see the next section, because this is where nearly everyone goes wrong.
- It connects with an ordinary plug and socket, alongside the rest of your electricity rather than on a circuit of its own.
- It has no battery in it. In the law's words, it must not be "designed to import electricity in order to store it".
That last one is the one that catches people out, and it is the reason a lot of the most popular kits are not plug-in solar in the legal sense.
The rules themselves are in SI 2026/848, if you want to read them.
Finding 1 — the number on the box is usually not the number in the rules
The 800W limit applies to AC output — what the inverter feeds into your socket. Almost every product is advertised by its DC panel wattage, which is a different and usually larger number.
So a kit sold as "1030W" or "1260W" can be entirely legitimate, because its inverter is capped at 800W (many are rated 799VA precisely to sit under the limit). And a kit advertised as "800W" tells you nothing on its own, because you cannot tell which number is being quoted without checking the inverter spec separately.
On the ENA register itself, UKSOL — the manufacturer with the second-most devices listed — has both a "Pro Compact 460W" and a "Pro Max 1260W" kit registered, and both carry the same 800W AC rating. The DC panel figure ranges across the register from under 500W to 1,260W; every device we checked carries an AC rating of 800W or less (a handful sit lower, at 340–475W). None of that DC range is a problem in itself. But it means you cannot judge a kit's legality from its headline wattage, which is exactly what a shopper naturally does.
Finding 2 — a kit with a battery in it needs an electrician
Solar-plus-battery is one of the formats selling best in the UK. It is also outside this legislation entirely — and the exclusion sits in the legal definition itself, not in a specification a minister can revise, so it would take Parliament to change it.
In our database, 17 of the products we recorded include a battery, from 9 different sellers. Some sellers offer both: the same product line in a solar-only version that fits the rules, and a battery version that does not. Plug In Solar Ltd, for example, lists a "Storm 360W" kit with no battery alongside a "Storm 360W + Vault Battery" kit at a higher price — same panel, different product, different legal route.
To be precise about what that means: a kit with a battery is not banned. You can buy one and have it fitted, by an electrician, the way solar and batteries have always been fitted. What you cannot do is plug it into a socket yourself. (The paperwork an electrician does for that is called G98 or G99.)
If you are buying because you liked the idea of no installation, that distinction is the whole purchase.
Finding 3 — the tested list is short, and the names on it are not the ones you would expect
Anything you plug in has to have been tested in a lab first for one thing above all: that it shuts itself off the instant the power goes out, so it cannot push electricity into a cable an engineer believes is dead. That test is called G98, and it applies to every device that feeds electricity back into the network. In practice a plug-in kit needs a device that has been through it, the engineering rules covering small generators connected in parallel with the grid. The critical requirement is anti-islanding: if the grid goes down, the device must stop feeding it, or it could energise a cable an engineer believes is dead.
Type-tested devices are published on the ENA's Connect Direct register. At the time of writing it holds 31 plug-in solar devices.
Thirty-one. For an entire national market, days after legalisation, with kits already stocked by national retailers.
The largest holders are Perlight Solar (8 devices) and UKSOL (7 devices) — not the consumer brands you would find first in a search. Behind them: Modular Solar Technologies and InstaGroup (3 each), TSUNESS and Thunder Energy (2 each), and single entries from Anker, Segen, FOXESS, Octopus Energy, EcoFlow and City Plumbing.
Finding 4 — passing the lab test is not the last hurdle
Every entry on the register carries a device status, and it is the field that matters most to a buyer. ENA explain it on each device's page, under a heading noting that 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"
Across the whole register — all four categories, 9,279 devices — 1,514 currently carry the non-compliant status.
The important thing about this field is what it is not.
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 separate, human assessment by ENA's evaluators, sitting on top of the test data. Passing the test and having the submission accepted are two different steps, and this field reports the second.
It is not a statement that a product is illegal, banned, or unusable. ENA's claim is narrower and more useful than that: network operators are unlikely to accept the equipment on their networks. That is worth knowing before you buy a device you will then have to notify your network operator about. It is not a ban, and we will not repeat it as one.
It is ENA's assessment, not ours. We report what the register says and link every device to ENA's own entry so you can check it. Where we record our own verdict on a product it is a separate field, separately attributed, and it is not derived from this one.
And it moves. One manufacturer's status changed within days of being listed, so whenever we show a status we show the date we read it.
What this means if you are buying one
- Ask for the reference number. Every tested device has one, and it looks like
UKSOL/21008/V1/A4. Its formal name is the System Reference. A seller who cannot give you theirs is asking you to take their word for it. - Check the AC figure, not the panel figure. Ask what the inverter is rated at. It should be 800W or less.
- If it has a battery, it is not a plug-in device. However it is marketed.
- A registered inverter does not mean a registered kit. Some kits are registered in their own right; some contain an inverter registered separately by its manufacturer. These are not the same thing, and only the correct one applies to what you are buying.
Our method, so you can check it
We built the product list from sellers' own published pages, recorded AC and DC wattage separately where a seller publishes both, and cross-referenced the ENA Connect Direct register by device reference. Where a seller does not publish an AC rating we record that as unknown rather than guessing. Where we have not verified something we say so on the page rather than filling the gap.
Where this piece reports the ENA's device status we quote ENA's own published wording and attribute it to them. It is their assessment of a device, not our verdict on a product, and the two are recorded separately.
We make money from listings and advertising. Those never change a compliance result, and paid placements are labelled as paid wherever they appear.
The counts in this piece are read from our database when the page is served, not typed in when it was written, so they are current as at the date shown above rather than frozen at publication.
Last checked 29 August 2026. The register changes and device statuses move — one manufacturer's changed within days of listing — so we re-check daily.