The list is short. It is also the difference between plugging something in on a Saturday and waiting eight weeks for a decision.
| Case | Condition |
|---|---|
| Pitched roof | Sit below the ridge and project no more than 200 mm |
| Flat roof | No more than 600 mm above the roof surface |
| Wall abutting a highway | Project no more than 200 mm |
| Any other wall | Project no more than 400 mm |
| Conservation area or World Heritage Site | Nothing on a wall that fronts a highway |
| Wooden wall, balcony or timber cladding | Not covered for plug-in solar, on a house or on a block of flats |
| Listed building grounds, scheduled monument | Outside the right entirely |
| The listed building itself | Planning permission and listed building consent both, with pre-application advice recommended early |
Planning Portal guidance for solar equipment on a house, a block of flats or a building within the curtilage, read 13 September 2026.
It is the one condition written for this product specifically, and it is the one the market has not absorbed.
Search for one of these devices and the listings will call it balcony solar. Read the conditions and you find that a wooden wall, a balcony or timber cladding is precisely what the right will not stretch to. The product is lawful either way. What you lose is the part that made it attractive, which was not having to ask anybody.
If you are unsure what is behind the face of your balcony, that is a question worth answering before you order rather than afterwards.
A frame in a garden is outside that argument entirely, and it is the arrangement the numbers on our home page already favour. Two different reasons pointing at the same answer.
A transitional year runs from the change. Through it, the conditions as they stood before 27 August 2026 may be relied on instead of the rewritten ones, which means two different answers to the same question are both currently right.
The practical consequence is narrow but sharp. If somebody is advising you on a timber surface this year, ask which set they are working from and what they expect to happen when the older set runs out.
We have read the published guidance but not the amending order behind it, so we quote the guidance and attribute it as guidance. When we hold the order itself, the exact statutory wording of the timber exclusion will appear here.