Solar in Kent: roof suitability, generation and planning.
Kent has enough daylight for home solar to generate meaningful electricity across the year. Whether it suits your house comes down to the roof, the shading and how you use power.
What Kent's conditions mean for your roof.
Kent's long-term average is around 1,846 hours of sunshine a year (Met Office, Manston station), against a UK average of roughly 1,403. That is a helpful starting point, but a county figure cannot tell you whether your roof is a good investment. Direction, pitch, shading, system size and how your household uses electricity all matter more to the result, so we estimate from your property rather than from the postcode alone.
That is also why we do not promise a fixed payback period. Grey days reduce output but do not stop it, and what counts is the expected generation across a full year and how much of it your home uses.
Coastal, Wealden or town: different roofs, different questions.
The Kent Downs National Landscape and your roof.
Most homes in Kent fall under permitted development for solar panels, meaning no planning application is needed, provided panels do not protrude more than 200mm from the roof plane or sit above the roof ridge. Parts of Kent sit within the Kent Downs National Landscape (formerly known as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, or AONB), where visual impact from new development is more carefully regulated under the Kent Downs Management Plan, and permission can be needed even for installations that would normally be permitted development elsewhere.
Where your property sits relative to the boundary, and what that means for your roof, depends on the exact address and the details of the installation. We check it for every Kent home during the survey, before any work is planned.
What this means in practice
Even inside the Kent Downs National Landscape, a plain roof-mounted system on an ordinary house will usually still be permitted development. Ground-mounted arrays, larger or more prominent installations and listed buildings are the cases that tend to need permission, and we'll tell you which applies to you early on, before you have committed to anything.
Listed buildings always require listed building consent for solar installation, regardless of location, since any alteration to a listed building needs separate approval.
See what your Kent roof could generate
Tell us about your home and what you're considering. We'll review suitability, including a planning check for your property.
Free and no obligation. Asking about payment options is not a finance application and won't affect your credit file.
No obligation to proceed. If the property looks suitable, a member of the solar team may contact you to clarify the details before a proposal is prepared.