Renting: can your landlord stop you installing plug-in solar?

Start with your tenancy agreement

Almost every tenancy contains a covenant against alterations without consent. That is the practical starting point, and it is why the honest first answer is that you need to ask.

But there is a prior question worth settling, because it may make the whole thing simpler: is a plug-in device an alteration at all? It plugs into an existing socket. If it sits on a balcony floor or on a ballasted frame, nothing is fixed to the building, nothing is drilled, and you take it with you when you leave — which looks a great deal more like bringing a fridge than altering a property.

Fix it to a wall or a balcony rail, and that argument disappears.

The specification helps here more than you might expect. It requires that any attachment method “shall be reversible and non-permanent, and shall not compromise the structural integrity, fire performance, or weatherproofing of the building”. A compliant kit is therefore designed to come off again — which is a useful thing to be able to tell a landlord, and it is in the manufacturer’s own documentation rather than something you are asserting.

We have not found a case or a piece of guidance settling where the line falls for plug-in solar specifically. The distinction matters enough that we would raise it with a landlord rather than concede the point at the outset.

The route most pages miss

Where consent is needed, private tenants in England and Wales are not simply at the landlord’s discretion.

The Energy Efficiency (Private Rented Property) (England and Wales) Regulations 2015 give a qualifying tenant the right to serve notice requesting consent to a relevant energy efficiency improvement. The core duty is at regulation 10(1):

the landlord must not unreasonably refuse consent to the making of a relevant energy efficiency improvement

The improvement has to be on a defined list. Regulation 6 ties that list to the Schedule to the Green Deal (Qualifying Energy Improvements) Order 2012 — and that Schedule includes, at entry (cc), simply:

photovoltaics

It does not distinguish between roof-mounted and plug-in, or between fixed and portable. On its face, a solar photovoltaic device is a qualifying measure.

Who can use it

The regulations apply to England and Wales only. A property is in scope if it is let under an assured tenancy (including an assured shorthold), a regulated tenancy under the Rent Act 1977, or one of several agricultural tenancies. Social housing let at full market rent is in scope too. Leaseholders are a separate category of tenant under the regulations, and can use the route as well.

Regulation 9 rules out a request where, among other things, you have ended the tenancy, are within three months of the end of a fixed term, are facing possession proceedings, have used a Green Deal plan for an improvement in the last six months, or have had a request refused on an exemption in the last six months.

Money is the other condition. Regulation 6(2) requires that the improvement can be “wholly financed, at no cost to the landlord, by means of funding provided by central government, a local authority or any other person”, or by the tenant, or a combination. A tenant buying their own kit meets this. Note the guidance’s wording: funding “must be available via one or more of the routes listed above, even if it is not ultimately used” — the availability is what makes the request valid.

The guidance is also candid that “at this time, Green Deal finance for a new Green Deal Plan is not available”. That was written in 2016 and remains true. The Green Deal survives here as the definition of a qualifying measure, not as a source of money.

When a landlord can still say no

“Must not unreasonably refuse” is not “must agree”. The regulations set out grounds, including where another tenant made a request within the previous six months, where housing enforcement notices are in force, where a written professional opinion advises against the specific measure, and where the tenant has previously refused a similar improvement the landlord proposed. There are also exemptions where the improvement would devalue the property by more than 5%.

Landlords must respond within set periods — an initial response within a month, and a full response within one to four months depending on the circumstances.

What the government said about renters

Renters came up repeatedly in the plug-in solar consultation, and the response records the tension honestly. Some respondents argued that “residents often do not control access to their roofs (e.g. in rented accommodation) so they should be given the right to install plug-in solar devices”. Others noted tenants would be deterred by opposition from landlords and freeholders and by “insurance uncertainty”.

One landlord’s point is recorded, and it is worth reading if you are drafting a request, because it explains the caution you may meet: after the Grenfell fire, the response notes, landlords have “a clear criminal liability with respect to building and fire safety, which will influence their likelihood of allowing tenants to install plug-in solar devices”.

The government’s own position stops at guidance. Its forthcoming consumer guidance will “make clear that renters, leaseholders and residents in managed buildings should obtain any permissions that may be required before installing a device” — an instruction to ask, not a right to install.

How to ask

Make it easy to say yes, and make refusal specific.

• Say what the device is: a plug-in solar device compliant with the Plug-in Solar Device Interim Product Specification, connected to a standard socket, not wired into the installation.
• Say how it is mounted, and offer the non-fixed option if one exists — ballasted or free-standing rather than drilled.
• Confirm you are paying, and that there is no cost to the landlord.
• Confirm you will make the G98 notification to the network operator.
• Confirm you will remove it and make good at the end of the tenancy.
• Ask them to confirm whether freeholder consent is required, since that is usually the real question.

If you are relying on the 2015 Regulations, say so. There is no prescribed form — the guidance says “there is no set form which you must use to make a tenant’s request” — but it must be in writing and must contain certain information, and “if it does not, it will not be a valid request and your landlord does not have to consider it”. Email counts as writing.

At minimum, regulation 8 requires a list of the measures you want to install, and what you will do to make good the property afterwards together with confirmation that you will cover the cost. Joint tenants must all agree the request, and it must come from all of them.

There is one requirement the template cannot solve. Regulation 8 asks for “a copy of the quotation for the cost of installing the measures from a Green Deal installer or another installer that meets relevant installer standards” — a document that does not exist for a device you plug in yourself. The template encloses the product quotation and says plainly that no installer is engaged because the device is designed for consumer installation. We cannot tell you how that would be treated if it were challenged, because as far as we can establish it never has been.

What we could not confirm

Whether a plug-in device is a “relevant energy efficiency improvement” in practice. The Schedule says photovoltaics without qualification, but we found no decision, guidance note or worked example applying it to a plug-in kit. The argument looks good on the text. It has not, as far as we can tell, been tested.

Whether departmental guidance from 2016 still reflects departmental thinking. The guidance we quote was published by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, which no longer exists, and has not to our knowledge been reissued. The regulations it explains are still in force and amended as recently as May 2026, but the guidance itself is nine years old. We have archived our copy, with a hash, on the source documents page.

Scotland and Northern Ireland. These regulations are England and Wales only. We have not researched the equivalent positions and will not guess at them.

If you have made a request like this — successfully or not — please tell us. Real outcomes would improve this page more than any amount of further reading.