Your Solar Panels Are Eight Years Old. Who Last Inspected Them?

An MCS certificate proves your solar panels were installed correctly on one day, years ago. It says nothing about their condition now. New insurer research found fires involving solar panels rose 133% in four years, and the leading single cause was DC cabling and connectors, which is a component that degrades quietly and is never seen by anybody standing in the house. The record worth having is a dated inspection report, and most solar owners in the UK have never had one.

What has happened

On 10 August 2026 the insurer QBE published research based on Freedom of Information requests it made to UK fire and rescue services earlier in the year. It found that fire services attended 212 fires involving solar panels in 2025, compared with 91 in 2022. Over the same four years the number of installations rose by 52%, so the fires are growing at more than twice the rate of the panels.

Residential premises accounted for 102 of the 212. That is the number that matters if you own a house with panels on it.

The cause breakdown is the useful part. DC cabling and connectors accounted for 49 fires in 2025, roughly double the previous year. The panel itself accounted for 36, battery banks for 23 and inverters for 19. QBE's recommendations to owners are unglamorous and entirely about upkeep: use a certificated installer, inspect annually, check the isolation switches, keep the cabling and connectors under review, and inspect again after severe weather.

The gap between what you have and what you need

Almost every solar owner in Britain has the same folder, and it contains the same things: an MCS certificate, an electrical installation certificate, a grid connection notification, a set of warranties and possibly a Smart Export Guarantee agreement.

Every one of those is a point-of-installation record. They describe a system on the day it was switched on. They are genuinely valuable, they are what a buyer's solicitor will ask for, and if yours are in a box in the loft you should go and find them before you need them.

What none of them tells you is whether the DC connectors on your roof are still tight, whether a rodent has been at the cabling, whether the array has micro-cracks from a hailstorm three winters ago, or whether the isolator still works. Those are questions about now, and answering them means somebody physically going to look.

That is what is missing from almost every solar folder in the country: a second, later, dated record.

What a proper inspection record looks like

There is a standard for this, and it is not obscure. BS EN IEC 62446-1 sets out the documentation, commissioning tests and inspection requirements for grid connected PV systems, and it is explicitly written to be used for periodic re-inspection as well as for handover. If you ask an installer to inspect your system to BS EN IEC 62446-1 and give you the report, you have asked a precise question and you will get a comparable document each time.

A useful inspection record is dated, names the person and company who carried it out, states what was actually tested rather than glanced at, records the DC string test results so the next inspection has something to compare against, notes the condition of connectors, mountings and cable containment, and confirms that the AC and DC isolators operate. Photographs help, because the next inspection can then be a comparison rather than a fresh opinion.

Keep it with the installation paperwork, not separately. A system's history only means something read end to end.

If you are a landlord, check your EICR carefully

Rented homes in England already have a five yearly electrical inspection requirement under the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020, which produces an EICR.

Do not assume that report covered the solar array. Take your most recent EICR and read the box headed extent of the installation covered by this report, and the one for agreed limitations. Those two boxes are where the inspector records what was left out. If the PV system, or the DC side of it, sits in the limitations, then your five yearly inspection has never looked at the leading cause of solar fires, and you should commission that separately. If it is not mentioned at all, ask.

This is worth ten minutes. The report is already in your files.

If you bought the house with the panels already on it

This is the most common situation and the worst documented one. You inherited an asset with no history, possibly no usable warranties, and often no idea who installed it.

Start with the MCS Installation Database, which holds a record of every MCS certificated installation in the UK since 2010 and is searchable by postcode and approximate installation date. If the record is there, the installation was certificated even though nobody gave you the certificate, and you have a commissioning date and a company name to work from. If you cannot find it, MCS runs a certificate query line and will look it up from the full address and the technology type. Then commission an inspection and treat its report as document one of a new record. You cannot recreate the history, but you can start one, and a five year old system with one good inspection report is in a far better position than a five year old system with a folder of paperwork from 2021 and nothing since.

The same logic applies when you sell. A buyer handed a certificate from installation and an inspection from last year is being told something quite different from a buyer handed the certificate alone. It belongs in the property logbook with everything else about the building.

This is general information about record keeping, not safety or legal advice. If you have any reason to think your system is faulty, stop and get a qualified installer to look at it.

Frequently asked questions

How often should solar panels be inspected?

There is no general legal interval for owner occupied homes. QBE's recommendation, made alongside this research, is annually, and after severe weather. Most systems in Britain have never been inspected at all, so any regular interval is an improvement on the current position.

Does my MCS certificate expire?

No. It is a record of the installation, and it stays valid as a record of that event forever. That is exactly why it cannot tell you anything about the system's condition today.

My panels are working fine. Is that not enough?

Not really. Generation figures tell you the system is producing power. A loose or corroded DC connector can arc intermittently while the array carries on generating normally, which is why the yield graph is not a substitute for somebody going up and looking.

Do I have to keep paper copies?

No, and scanned copies are fine, but keep them somewhere you will still be able to find them in ten years. The commonest failure here is not that the record was destroyed. It is that nobody could find it when it mattered.