‘I had solar panels worth £1,000s installed for free and you may be eligible too – four things I learned’

When a letter landed on the doormat telling my girlfriend and I that we might be eligible for energy upgrades to our home, we couldn’t quite believe it.

So much so, we ignored it, and it took a second piece of paper coming through the letterbox for us to investigate further.

Fast forward a few months and we’re the proud owners of a set of solar panels that are slashing our electricity bills and helping the environment – and we didn’t have to spend a penny.

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How did we manage it? Through the Warm Homes: Local Grant.

The £500 million scheme launched in April this year and is expected to run until March 2028.

Through the scheme, eligible households can get environmentally-friendly upgrades made to their home that also cut energy bills.

This includes wall, loft and underfloor insulation, air source heat pumps, smart controls and solar panels.

To qualify, your home must be in England, privately owned by yourself or a landlord and have an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) of D, E, F or G.

Your household income must usually be £36,000 a year or under, however you can still qualify if you earn more than this and you live in a certain postcode area or you or another resident are on benefits including Universal Credit, Housing Benefit or Pension Credit. There is an eligibility checker via gov.uk.

My girlfriend and I qualified for free solar panels, which typically cost £8,000 to install in a two-three bedroom home according to Checkatrade, because our EPC rating was D and we live in an eligible postcode. This was despite our joint income breaching the £36,000 threshold.

A team from the local council visited the property to carry out a survey, later telling us we were eligible for solar panels. They were installed just a few weeks later, at the start of October.

It all seemed too good to be true. However, it’s since saved us thousands of pounds in installation costs and ongoing electricity bills.

If you’re considering checking your eligibility, here are four things I learned.

There will be aesthetic drawbacks

Solar panels usually only work alongside a converter and battery. The converter changes up any electricity produced by the panels into the right current to power your home, while the battery stores any electricity the panels produce that’s not immediately needed.

However, installers won’t usually put them in lofts as they can overheat, so they may end up somewhere less than aesthetically pleasing.

Ours, for example, are bolted to the outside wall at the back of the property, and make for a bit of an eyesore.

Wiring is needed to connect your converter and battery to the mains electricity inside your home too. This means we have some exposed trunking in the downstairs toilet.

You may have to rely on the grid

Call me naïve, but I thought it would be possible to rely solely on the solar panels for all our electrical needs, especially as there are just two of us in the property.

But, there have been times when we’ve had to lean on the grid to power the home.

That said, given the panels have only been operational since the first week of October, when it's less sunny, this may change come next spring or summer.

You may have to take time off work

It took four days in total, from getting the survey done to having the panels installed, for all the work to be completed.

The survey took around two hours on one day, and the next visit, on a separate day, to decide where to place the solar panels, converter, battery and any wiring took around an hour.

The third day involved scaffolders setting up, with two other individual teams placing the solar panels on the roof and installing the converter and battery.

A couple of weeks later, the scaffolders returned to pack everything down.

Given this, you may have to take time off work to let the workers in and so you're in the home.

For those that work from home, you can arrange the work to be done for when you're not in the office.

You can track how much you've saved

The electrician who installed the converter and battery helped us get set up on an app, FoxCloud2.0, to track how much electricity the solar panels are producing.

The app also tells you how much electricity your home is using and how much is being channelled from the grid.

Most importantly, it has a “Total Revenue” widget, which shows you how much money you’ve saved since having the panels installed.

We’ve saved almost £40 in roughly a month, equating to £480 a year, although this figure will obviously flex and change based on the time of year.

We also plan to sign up for a new energy tariff with our supplier, Octopus Energy, which will let us sell back any excess electricity produced by the panels and boost our savings.

Other help for driving down energy bills

You may not be eligible for help through the Warm Homes: Local Grant, but there is other support on offer, as the government aims to turn the UK net zero by 2050.

You can currently get up to £7,500 grants towards the cost of a ground or air source heat pump if you live in England or Wales, through the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS).

To qualify for the scheme, you’ll need to own the property where the heat pump is being installed, and must be putting one in to replace a fossil fuel heating system.

Make sure you factor in that you will have to cover any costs that exceed the £7,500 grant.

Supply and installation of an air source heat pump costs between £3,000 and £15,000, according to Checkatrade. Ground source heat pumps cost between £18,000 and £50,000 to supply and install.

Ruth Emery recently revealed the five things she learned from installing a heat pump in her home, after she received a grant through the scheme. She has also examined whether the heat pump has saved her money.