Market

Two weeks after plug-in solar went legal, 48 kits are compliant but only 20 are actually for sale

The ENA Type Test Register listed 48 complete plug-in solar kits as compliant as of 10 September 2026, up from 20 on 2 September, but under half of those have an actual price and retailer attached. Perlight Solar leads the compliant pipeline with 12 approved kits, more than double any rival, yet most of its listings are still pending pricing and availability.

11 September 2026 · Source: Plug-in Solar Calculator (ENA Type Test Register tracker)

The number this site has been tracking since the 27 August legalisation date is the count of kits you can actually order, not the count of kits that have cleared the paperwork, and those two numbers are pulling apart faster than we expected. The ENA Type Test Register, the official list a kit has to be on before it's legal to self-install, has gone from 20 compliant kits on 2 September to 48 on 10 September, a doubling in eight days. But the site tracking that register alongside real retail availability puts the number you can actually buy right now at 20, meaning well under half of what's technically compliant has a price tag and a retailer attached to it.

That gap has a shape worth naming. Perlight Solar has 12 kits approved on the register, more than double the next-largest manufacturer, but the same tracker notes most of them remain pending pricing and availability details, meaning Perlight's dominance is a dominance of paperwork, not of shelves. UKSOL, the brand this site has followed since Argos became the first major retailer to list it on 29 August, has 6 kits for sale, more than any other manufacturer with a working price and a place to buy it. City Plumbing has 4, and was the first to break the £500 ceiling on a compliant 800W system, per this site's coverage of the single-kit-cap rules on 28 August. PatioSun has 5 for sale direct. The rest, the HDM Solars, the APsystems, the Modular Solars, are either single-digit for-sale counts or still stuck in the compliant-but-pending column.

For anyone reading this site to actually buy a kit rather than track a market, the practical read hasn't changed since Argos went live: check a specific product against the ENA register by name before paying for it, don't assume 'compliant on the register' means 'available today', and expect the list of real options to keep lagging the list of approved ones for a while yet. What has changed is the confidence you can have that this gap will close. A register that's more than doubled its approved count in a week and a half, with a clear manufacturing leader in Perlight still working through pricing, points toward more retail options arriving through September rather than the market stalling at the handful of brands that moved first.

Read the original: Plug-in Solar Calculator (ENA Type Test Register tracker). Commentary is Sandwich Solar's own editorial view; the original reporting is credited to its publisher.

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