Plug In Solar Is Coming – Should you Buy a Balcony Solar Kit? Pros and Cons

Plug-in solar is coming, but should you buy a kit for yourself? Well, probably yes, but there’s a lot more nuance available if you’re interested, so let’s dive in. First, why am I, the PC gaming tech reviewer, someone you should listen to about solar in the UK? Well, I built my very own DIY solar power system like three years ago now, and have been using, upgrading and tinkering with it ever since. I have at least some idea of what all this does, so let’s get into it! Starting with, what is plug in solar? It’s actually pretty simple on the face of it. You get one or two solar panels, an 800 watt microinverter, and it just plugs into your wall and powers your house while the sun is shining. Pretty cool! 

To be precise, the microinverter is really the thing we’re talking about. You can already buy solar panels, but if you want to hook them up to your house (and you don’t want to run your own wiring to have a separate off-grid power system like I do), you need an electrician, dedicated circuits and a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork. These grid-tie microinverters are a bit of a step change in how the UK and European governments see power generation. This is often called “balcony solar” in Germany as people buy a panel or two to hand on their balconies, and these are just being introduced in the UK, with Lidl set to sell the first kit real soon. These little inverters are grid-following, meaning they require a grid power connection to be able to output power – they don’t produce their own signal – meaning in a black-out you will still be left without power. This is a key safety feature so you don’t accidentally electrocute a power line worker who thinks the line is dead. So that’s the first con, if your power goes out, this style of solar won’t help you. 

The other, possibly most obvious, con is that you’ll only be able to use however much energy is being produced at that moment, in that moment. While that might be useful if you have 800 watts of equipment running during the day, it’s more likely you use most of your energy at night, and hell, even your fridge generally only runs about half the time, so you’ll struggle to get all that much use out of that solar energy – and especially since the feed in rates have plummeted, you might struggle to find much benefit from just a panel or two and a microinverter. Storage though, that’s where it’s at. Storing all that energy and being able to use it later? Now that’s what we’re talking about! Unfortunately, there isn’t a super easy way to add a battery to these plug in solar kits. There are some plug in solar solutions, namely from the likes of Anker and their SOLIX plug in kits, but they’ll run you a pretty penny, and as far as I’m aware aren’t exactly approved for the UK yet. Anker doesn’t actually make these available to the UK yet, although they are available in Germany as both plug-in and wire-in solutions. Still, they’ll run you a pretty penny – over a thousand Euros for a small 2.7 kWh battery and built in 800 watt (or 1200 watt if you wire it in directly) inverter. That’s a lot – enough to make you consider just getting a proper solution instead! At least with Aferiy’s PS240 option you’ll be into it for not an unreasonable amount of money and can still work as a plug-in, and with a whole lot more solar input capacity. 

If you did go for a full install you are obviously looking at a higher cost, both in labour and in materials. You’ll also likely want more panels, likely on your roof (if you have one), and so you’d be looking at 5 grand minimum, up to ten for a regular sized house. That’s quite the step up from a couple hundred quid for a panel or two and a microinverter. The half-way-house solution is basically what I’ve done, an off-grid system. I have a separate 3kW inverter in the shed (acting as a battery heater, which works great!) and separate wiring, and I switch loads on and off based on how much energy the battery has stored. I have to manage this pretty manually, keeping an eye on my DIY LiFePo4 battery’s cell voltages, and tracking both how much generation we’ve had, and how much of that we’ve used. It does mean though that I can run anything a standard 13 amp socket would run from solar (especially as the inverter is rated to 6 kW peak), so my two servers and my gaming PC are fair game, as is my portable air conditioner in the summer. 

Getting back to plug-in solar, it’s worth making clear the limitations. Much like Germany, the UK is planning to have an 800 watt limit on plug-in solar appliances, basically as a catch-all for safety. If you’ve got old wiring with poor insulation, 800 watts is low enough that it isn’t likely to cause a major problem if you plug one of these kits in. Obviously a UK plug with a 13 amp fuse is rated for around 3 kW at peak, or a bit over 2 kW sustained, so you can see just how limited this ‘balcony solar’ limit is by comparison. Add to that the fact that most socket circuits (which in the UK are ring circuits rather than radials) have a 32 amp MCB (circuit breaker) The one area I’ve yet to find a final answer on is if you are allowed to plug in multiple of these kits at once (ideally to different sockets or circuits), as the wording is around allowing “up to 800 watt units”, not 800 watt total. That is also potentially important as solar can be a little tricksy. If all your panels are together, facing the same way, all getting the same amount of sun, awesome, you’re set. If you put one on one face of your wall, and another on a difference face so they get the sun at different times of the day, you’ll actually be losing a decent amount of power, as one of the key features of these microinverters (and any good solar charger type device) is MPPT – maximum power point tracking. Basically the charger or inverter will figure out the ideal voltage and amperage to extract the most power out of the panels, but if one panel is getting all the sun and another isn’t, that means the charger or inverter can’t extract as much power from the one in the sun. In that case two separate inverters would work a lot better. 

On the whole though, balcony solar, or plug in solar, whatever you want to call it, is a really cool option for those that don’t have a roof to fill with solar, who don’t want to spend five or ten grand to get it fitted yet, or for those who are renting and can’t make long term modifications like that to a house you don’t own. The fact they’ll be available in stores soon is amazing, and even for staving off a little bit of cost – likely up to £100 a year with the current energy prices – is brilliant. I’m excited for these to hit the shelves, even if I’m likely going to stick with my own solution for the time being. If you are serious about balcony solar though, sticking a battery in the middle would be great, and the Aferiy one being more like £700 right now will definitely help, especially as you can add more panels and actually make use of the power when you need it.