Solar Panels Woking

Usually not. Roof-mounted solar on a house is permitted development across England — including in the green belt, which covers about 60% of the borough — provided panels project no more than 0.2m beyond the roof plane and don't rise above the highest part of the roof (GPDO 2015, Schedule 2, Part 14). Woking's 27 conservation areas, including Horsell, Old Woking and St John's, add one real restriction: wall-mounted panels facing a highway aren't permitted, and flat-roof installations have tighter rules. Listed buildings always need consent. We check the specific address before we quote.

Central Woking, and the surrounding GU21, GU22 and GU23 districts including Sheerwater, Horsell, Knaphill, Byfleet and Pyrford, sit in UK Power Networks' South Eastern Power Networks licence area; Chobham, over the boundary in Surrey Heath, is on SSEN's Southern network. Your installer sends the G98 notification (or a G99 application for larger systems) to whichever operator serves your address. Network boundaries can run street by street, so confirm your own property on the Energy Networks Association's postcode lookup.

Not from the borough directly. Woking Borough Council issued a Section 114 notice in June 2023, so despite its pioneering energy history there's no current borough solar funding. What is running is Solar Together Surrey: a county-council group-buying scheme with iChoosr where you register free with no obligation, pre-vetted installers bid in a reverse auction, and panels, retrofit batteries and EV charge points are all covered. About 2,250 Surrey residents have installed through it since 2021. It's a fair benchmark to compare any quote against — including ours.

Solar panels work UK-wide, so Woking needs no special case made for it — but for a local figure, the nearest Met Office climate station at Wisley, a few miles east of town, averaged 1,564.3 hours of sunshine a year over the 1981-2010 period. Panels generate from daylight, not just direct sun, so they keep producing at a reduced rate on overcast days. What matters far more for your individual quote is roof orientation, pitch and shading — which is why we assess your actual roof rather than quoting from regional averages.

It's the improvement assessors most often suggest here. Half of Woking's EPC-rated homes sit at band D or below, and EPC Advisor's analysis of the GOV.UK register shows the single most-recommended improvement on Woking certificates is a 2.5 kWp solar PV array — recommended 25,929 times across the borough's 33,598 assessed properties. What that's worth to you depends on your home and how you use energy; we won't promise specific bill savings or a jump in house value, because nobody honestly can.

Start from the Energy Saving Trust's national figure — about £7,600 installed for a typical 4.5 kWp, twelve-panel system (updated 27 August 2026), with 0% VAT on residential installs until 31 March 2027. One Woking-specific wrinkle: the most common EPC recommendation in the borough is a 2.5 kWp system, appearing on 25,929 certificates, so a smaller, cheaper array is often what a home here actually needs. A survey, not a table, settles which.

We ran PVGIS 5.3 for Woking rather than quoting a generic yield: a 4 kWp array at 35°, facing south, with 14% losses, is estimated at about 3,984 kWh a year — around 996 kWh per kWp — with year-to-year variation of roughly ±156 kWh (SARAH3, 2005–2023). The nearest Met Office station at Wisley averaged 1,564.3 sunshine hours a year over 1981–2010, which is consistent with that estimate.

Neither removes a householder's permitted development rights for roof-mounted panels. About 60% of the borough is Metropolitan Green Belt and there are 27 conservation areas, but roof-mounted solar remains permitted development in both, subject to the usual conditions — panels must not project more than 200 mm and must be removed when no longer needed. Listed buildings are the exception and always need consent.