The government's own safety study behind this week's legalisation of plug-in solar panels found no electrical hazard in the technology itself, but it also concluded that "product quality is not uniform across the market", a finding that gives real, government-tested substance to warnings from risk assessors like RiskSTOP about verifying compliance rather than treating plug-in PV as risk-free.
DESNZ commissioned Arceio and laboratory partner Eurofins to test six commercially available plug-in PV devices on simulated UK domestic circuits ahead of the rules taking effect on 27 August. The study found stable thermal behaviour, reliable anti-islanding disconnection and no sustained unsafe energisation across the sample, the evidence base that ultimately supported legalisation.
But the same study also documented specific variation between units. One device recorded a residual current circuit breaker (RCBO) trip time of 89 milliseconds against the required 40-millisecond safety threshold in a specific fault scenario, another showed physical shrinkage of its cable sheath under sustained heat, and export-limitation accuracy varied enough that two lower-rated devices exceeded their declared output at certain voltage levels.
RiskSTOP's Johnny Thomson said plug-in systems introduce "many of the same electrical, fire and structural hazards associated with traditional PV systems."
The compliance point is where the government's evidence and RiskSTOP's warning converge. Qualifying devices are meant to be listed on the Energy Networks Association's compliant-device register, but network notification arrangements are still being finalised, and there is no mandatory inspection built into the legalisation itself, meaning a non-compliant or unregistered unit could be installed with little to flag it to a landlord, freeholder or insurer.
For brokers, that gap is the practical takeaway: asking whether an installed device is confirmed on the ENA register is now a distinct, evidence-backed underwriting and claims question, separate from the broader fire-risk awareness already being raised across the market, and one that follows directly from the same study the government used to justify legalising the technology in the first place.
