Plug-in solar is legal today. Here is what you can actually buy.

We have been counting down to this date for months, and it has arrived more or less as promised. SI 2026 No. 848 came into force this morning, EREC G98 Issue 2 Amendment 1 took effect alongside it, and for the first time a household in Great Britain can buy a solar kit, plug it into a normal socket, notify the network afterwards and be entirely within the law. That is a genuinely good thing, and I do not want the rest of this piece to bury it.

I do want to be straight about what day one actually looks like, because there is a gap between the announcement and the shelf. The government's news release, published yesterday, says households could save up to £110 a year, that each kit produces up to 800W, and that panels can provide up to 20% of an average home's electricity. It lists Amazon, Argos, B&Q, Currys, Screwfix, Wickes and British Gas as retailers. Trevor Hutchings of the Renewable Energy Association is quoted saying that from today, with little more than a trip to the shops, people in Britain will be able to harness the energy of the sun. That is the picture most people will have read over breakfast.

The ENA G98 Type Test Register tells a narrower story. Seven products carry a Compliant status this morning, published on 18 and 19 August, and every one of them is made by UKSOL Ltd. Anker and GoodWe filed entries in late July and early August and both are still marked Non-compliant, which on that register means testing and documentation are not finished, not that the products failed. So the trip to the shops is real, the choice at the end of it is one brand.

The seven approved kits

All seven are UKSOL, all are listed at 0.8 kW single phase, and all were published on 18 or 19 August 2026. The 0.8 kW figure is the inverter export limit set by the Interim Product Specification, not the panel wattage, which is why a 1260W kit still reads as 0.8 kW.

The price, and the nine week wait

Argos has the Pro Max 1260W listed at £989.00, and when I checked the listing this morning it carried four words that the coverage did not: delivery within 9 weeks. That is the number that stings. A household that reads yesterday's release, walks into Argos today and orders the flagship kit could be waiting until the end of October for the panels. It may well come sooner, because within nine weeks is an outside limit rather than a promise of nine, but nothing on the listing commits to sooner.

Prices elsewhere vary more than you might expect for a single manufacturer. City Plumbing lists the Pro Compact 515W at £670.80 including VAT. solarkits.co.uk has the ground mount Pro Compact 460W at £749. TechRadar reported the ground mount kits going on sale from an RRP of £699, with the 460W at £849 and the 890W at £1,199 including VAT and delivery. It is worth ringing round before you buy, because the same kit is not the same price everywhere.

Set against panel wattage, a pattern falls out that I did not expect, and it matters more than the headline price.

The cheapest kit on the shelf is the worst value on the shelf. The 460W works out at roughly twice the per-watt rate of the 1260W, and the 515W is not much better. The Pro Max at £0.78 per watt is actually competitive: it sits inside the range an EcoFlow STREAM sells for on Amazon UK, and close to what a premium branded set fetches in Germany, where the market has been competitive for years and private solar purchases have been zero-rated for VAT since 2023. So the honest summary is not that UKSOL is expensive. It is that UKSOL is reasonable at the top of its range and dear at the bottom, and the bottom is where a cautious first-time buyer will instinctively start.

Is a premium justified?

Some of it plainly is. Type testing and registration cost real money and that cost is being recovered across a small first batch. UKSOL builds under a British brand with UK support and warranty behind it, and its ground mounts are made in Sheffield. The kits include mounting hardware, and the ground mount prices quoted include delivery. And the comparison with EcoFlow is not like for like on the thing that matters most today, because a STREAM is not on the register, so it is not lawful to plug into a socket. Buyers are paying for legality as much as for hardware.

Two things do not explain it. VAT does not, because both UK prices carry the same 20%, so stripping it moves both by the same proportion. VAT explains the gap to Germany and nothing else, though it is worth knowing that buying a kit yourself is standard-rated at 20% while paying a contractor to supply and install energy-saving materials is zero-rated until 31 March 2027, per the House of Commons Library briefing on the relief. And scarcity does not explain it, because UKSOL is not short of panels. It is short of competitors.

That is the real mechanism, and I would rather name it plainly than imply something worse. One company holds every compliant listing on the register, so nothing is currently constraining what it charges. That is not an accusation, it is a description. The trade view, and I share it, is that this corrects itself once Anker, GoodWe, EcoFlow or anyone else clears type testing, because that is exactly what happened in Germany as entrants arrived. Nobody can tell you the date. UKSOL's chief executive Andrew Moore has said publicly that safety, provenance, quality and after-sales support need to matter beyond price, which is how you position a premium product, and on day one of a new category he is not obviously wrong to.

On distribution, UKSOL indicated to me that it is currently routing orders on a dropship basis through its own store rather than holding stock deep in the retail channel. That is consistent with what the Argos lead time suggests, and it is worth knowing if you are wondering why a product that is legally available is not physically available.

The timing, and the weather

This is the part I find hardest to be cheerful about. A UK plug-in kit earns most of its annual output between April and September. Order the Argos Pro Max today on a delivery window of within 9 weeks and it could land as late as the end of October, into the worst eight weeks of the British solar year, which would put the first meaningful generation realistically in next spring.

The forecast does not help. The Met Office, writing on 18 August, expects unsettled conditions for the remainder of August with frequent showers and spells of rain, and a September that is wetter than average, particularly across the northwest, with a northwest to southeast split that may leave southern areas drier. Temperatures could trend above average later in the period, though the Met Office puts low confidence on that and, to its credit, explicitly warns that weather headlines tend to seize on a single dramatic outcome rather than the more moderate picture it actually forecasts. So: not a washout, not a heatwave, just a soft end to the generating season. If you want to see what that means for your own roof or balcony, the postcode calculator models it properly rather than guessing.

None of that is an argument against buying. It is an argument against expecting a summer payback from an autumn purchase, and against the framing that this technology starts saving you money the moment it is legal.

What is still missing: batteries

The gap I most want closed is storage. Batteries and solar-plus-battery are explicitly out of scope of the Interim Product Specification and of the G98 amendment, and that limitation shapes the economics more than anything else on this page. A plug-in kit with no storage offsets whatever your home is drawing while the sun is up. Most households draw the least then, and the most between five and nine in the evening, so a good chunk of what the panels make simply flows out to the grid for nothing.

Germany worked this out early, which is why so many of the popular sets there ship with a small battery. The government's own release notes Germany installed around 500,000 new devices last year. Bringing storage into scope, with a sane cap and a proper safety specification, is the single change that would move UK plug-in solar from a modest bill trim to something a normal household notices. A revision of the underlying British Standards is expected to take two to three years, but the Interim Product Specification is, by name, interim. There is room to move sooner.

My hope, and it is a hope rather than a forecast, is that storage is in scope before next spring, so the second season of this market is a better one than the first.

What I would do today

1. Check the register before you check the price. Match the model code on the box to a Compliant entry. Our live tracker lists all seven, and it is updated as more appear.
2. If you are buying now, buy the biggest kit your space allows. On today's prices the per-watt value roughly doubles between the 460W and the 1260W. Do not let a lower ticket price talk you into worse value.
3. Ask about the lead time before you pay. A delivery window of within 9 weeks on the headline listing is not what most buyers will expect, and it varies by retailer.
4. If you can wait, waiting is the cheaper decision. A second compliant manufacturer is the thing that moves prices, and you would be waiting through the months when a kit generates least anyway.
5. Run your own numbers first. Orientation and shading matter more than brand. The calculator is free, takes a postcode, and has no sign-up.

I have been sceptical of the hype around this date and I remain glad it arrived. A rule that stood in the way of ordinary people generating a little of their own electricity has gone, the safety framework behind it is serious rather than token, and the first company through the gate did the unglamorous work of type testing to get there. The market that follows will be cheaper and broader than the one we have this morning. I would just rather you went in with the real numbers than the press release ones.

Sources: the ENA G98/G99 Type Test Verification Register, checked 27 August 2026; the government news release "Households can save as plug-in solar panels come to market", 26 August 2026; Argos product listing 9837133; City Plumbing and solarkits.co.uk listings; TechRadar, 19 August 2026; the Met Office weather headline review, 18 August 2026; House of Commons Library briefing CBP-8602 on VAT for energy-saving materials. Spotted something wrong? Email [email protected] and I will verify and correct it. Adeniyi.