How can I benefit from Solar Insights?

With the solar insights feature you can see what power your home could generate over the next 14 days. Our handy tool calculates this using the latest weather forecast and information about your solar panel set up. If you don't have solar panels, we can use a solar panel set up for the average home in the UK, or you can customise your solar profile based upon your home. This way you can get an idea of how you can benefit from adding solar panels to your property before you commit to purchasing them.

If you have solar panels, you can set your profile to reflect your solar set up. If you don’t have solar panels, you can set your profile to reflect what your home set up could look like with solar panels. If you don’t know any answers to the questions, we’ll base this on the average home in the UK to give a rough idea of what you could expect from solar panels. 

The power will determine the generation capacity of your panels - this is essential to calculate how much energy your solar panels could produce. 

The orientation and inclination of solar panels affect how and for how long solar radiation hits them. Solar radiation is one of the main factors that determines solar generation and will create a more accurate solar generation forecast. 

Your solar generation is based on predicted radiation from the sun, and the power, angle and direction of your solar panels. We use these details alongside the cloud and weather forecast for the next 14 days to calculate your solar generation. 

Other things can impact your predicted solar generation, including shading (e.g. a tree, neighbours roof) and soiling on your panels (e.g. moss, dust, or snow), which isn’t captured in your Solar Insights generation forecast. 

Solar generation is subject to the weather, which can change quickly. We use a high-resolution solar-power specific forecast, that provides the best quality forecast using satellite imagery. The forecast for today, is expected to be relatively accurate, but forecasts for further in the future are subject to more change as the weather changes. 

Our solar forecast data comes from Solcast, a DNV company. Their forecasts are built using global weather datasets, satellite imagery of clouds, and machine learning techniques to predict the movement and development of clouds in high-resolution.