If you have bought a house with solar panels, you have inherited four separate things, and only one of them is on the roof: the hardware, a monitoring account that is almost certainly still in the installer’s or the previous owner’s name, a folder of warranty and commissioning paperwork you may never have been handed, and a grid registration that decides whether anyone pays you for what the panels export. None of it moves across on completion by itself. The first job is to find out whether the system produces what the weather says it should, because an inherited array can sit there for months doing nothing at all, and nobody in the payment chain will tell you.
Owners describe exactly this:
I’ve just moved into a new house which has solar panels. From what I can see, the panels don’t seem to be generating any energy, as the meter doesn’t appear to be changing - I’ve monitored across multiple days with full sun on the panels. It looks like the inverter in the loft is dead
Bought a house with solar panels: what to find on day one
Five things, in this order. All of them can be found in an afternoon, without a single login.
1. The inverter, its make and its age. It is usually in the loft, the garage or a utility cupboard. Photograph the label: brand, model, serial number, and any date printed on it. That label is the first thing every warranty conversation and every support ticket will ask you for. If the inverter went in with the panels, its age tells you where you are in its life.
2. The generation meter. In a UK house on a feed-in tariff there is a separate meter counting what the panels generate, usually beside the inverter (not the smart meter your supplier bills you from). Photograph the reading and the date. This is your baseline, and it is also the cheapest diagnostic you own: see the first check below.
3. The monitoring account. Look for a small box with an ethernet cable or an aerial next to the inverter: a gateway, datalogger or communication stick. Whichever brand is on it is the portal your production data has been going to for years. Whose account it lands in is the subject of its own section.
4. The paperwork. Commissioning certificate, installation certificate, inverter and panel warranties, the tariff statement, meter reading history. Ofgem puts the job of collecting it on you: the new owner has to get all the records from the previous one, and if the installation is audited, you must show its paperwork from the day it was commissioned. If you have not completed yet, ask for that folder now. It is far harder to get afterwards.
5. The grid and payment registration. Who, if anyone, is paying for the electricity this roof exports, and in whose name. This is where most inherited systems lose money.
“We inherited the system” — whose name everything is in
Nothing in the chain assumes a house sale. The tariff is registered to a named generator, the monitoring site record belongs to whoever created it, and the export contract, if there is one, is a contract with somebody who no longer lives there.
One issue I really have no idea about at all and I’m unsure where to start is the 16 solar panels on the roof. They are working and on a feed in tariff at least. … I don’t know if every single panel works, if there’s any faults, any damage etc
If the house is in Great Britain and the system is on a feed-in tariff (FIT)
A domestic roof array is almost always what Ofgem calls an MCS-FIT installation: solar or wind at or below 50 kW declared net capacity. For those, contact the FIT licensee the installation is registered with as soon as reasonably possible after the change of ownership. They update the generator’s details on the Central FIT Register.
The FIT licensee is the electricity supplier that pays the tariff. That is not Ofgem, and not necessarily the supplier who bills you for what you import.
Solar and wind above 50 kW DNC, and all AD and hydro, are ROO-FIT, and their route runs through Ofgem first: update the Renewable Electricity Register by emailing [email protected], complete the transfer request form the team sends back, then notify the FIT licensee so they update the Central FIT Register.
If the seller left you nothing and you cannot even work out which supplier holds the registration, send Ofgem an Ownership Register Query (ORQ). It releases what the Central FIT Register holds once you have sent proof of identity.
If the system is post-2019 and on the Smart Export Guarantee (SEG)
The feed-in tariff closed to new applicants on 31 March 2019. Newer systems export under the Smart Export Guarantee, and SEG pays nobody automatically: you apply to a SEG licensee yourself, and it does not have to be the company that supplies your electricity. Before you apply, work out whether the same exported kWh would be worth more stored and used at home: see a home battery for your solar panels.
Three things make the installation eligible: the installation or installer is suitably certified, there is an export meter that can take half-hourly readings, and that meter has an export MPAN (the 13-digit number that identifies an electricity connection point).
Certification, usually the MCS certificate, is where an inherited system most often falls over, because the certificate lives in the seller’s folder. If you cannot show it, a SEG licensee does not have to pay you, though it may choose to.
Two more rules before you sign anything. Every SEG contract requires you to tell the licensee when the installation changes hands. And FIT export and SEG do not stack: you cannot claim SEG while you are paid an export tariff under the feed-in tariff, and Ofgem warns that “Collecting SEG and FIT export payments at the same time, knowingly, could constitute fraud.”
If the house is in Ireland
The document that matters is the NC6. ESB Networks requires a notification form for micro-generation (defined as up to about 6 kVA single-phase or about 11 kVA three-phase at low voltage), and a type test certificate for the micro-generator, stating compliance with IS EN50549-1, has to accompany the application form. The installation must be carried out by a registered electrical contractor to Safe Electric standards, and applications are no longer processed by email.
If no NC6 was ever submitted for the panels you have bought, ESB Networks has a retrospective registration process for exactly that. Do it now: your MEC is registered from the date ESB Networks receives an acceptable NC6, and nothing is backdated.
The smart meter comes after the paperwork: for eligible customers, ESB Networks aims to fit one within four months of a valid NC6 being processed. Payment for what you export comes under the Clean Export Guarantee.
The monitoring account is still in the installer’s name
An owner login shows you production. Who receives the alerts, and who can change the rules behind them, differs by brand, and on two of the three it follows whoever set the site up.
SolarEdge. The alert system is built for installers. Only users with the account manager or account admin role can create, edit or enable alert rules, and a homeowner login has neither. Even alert e-mails to you need a permission someone with that role sets: Admin → Site Access → your user → “Expose to alerts notifications”. Ask whoever holds the account to tick it. For what you will see once you are in, see SolarEdge error codes and the SolarEdge monitoring page.
Enphase. This is the one you can set yourself. In the Enphase App, open Menu > Account > My Notifications, untick Receive only recommended notifications to choose your own, and pick Email, Text or Push. Put your own e-mail address and mobile number in on day one. Then learn the thresholds, because they are wide: a microinverter that has not reported for 12 hours of daylight is only a warning, and you are notified once at least 10% of the microinverters have not reported for five consecutive days. On an eleven-panel roof, Enphase’s own example, one silent microinverter for five days stays a warning. See Enphase microinverter not reporting and the Enphase monitoring page.
Growatt. The homeowner app is a viewer. Alerts are three tick-boxes in the ShineServer web portal (alerts, daily reports, monthly reports), and they go to the mailbox on the station record. That address was entered when the plant was set up, which on an inherited system means the installer, or the person who sold you the house. See Growatt error codes 203 and 117 and the Growatt monitoring page.
If the installer who created the account is no longer trading, the route is different again, and it is covered in your solar installer went bust. Which alerts reach whom, brand by brand, is set out in who gets your solar alerts.
The first check: are the inherited solar panels actually working?
Do this before you chase any paperwork, because it decides how urgent the rest of it is. You do not need a login for any of it.
- Read the generation meter, then read it again a week later. If the number has not moved through a week with sun in it, the system is not generating. A new-build owner spotted exactly that: an “Emlite ECA2.z meter that has been stuck on 2.85kWh since I moved in”, with the red LED solid rather than flashing.
- Look at the inverter mid-morning on a clear day. A display or LED showing nothing at midday in June is not a subtle fault. How do I know if my solar panels are working walks through the checks in order; if it is dark or silent, go to inverter offline or not producing.
- Compare a day’s kWh against what the weather that day justified. This is the only check that catches a system that is up and communicating but producing far less than it should. The method is in check solar production against weather, and what to do about a shortfall is in solar panels producing less than expected.
Under the feed-in tariff the meter is the payment mechanism, and you are the one who reads it. FIT payments are based on your meter readings, and Ofgem is plain that “Estimates cannot be used.” Even where export is deemed rather than metered, you need a valid generation reading to be paid for either.
Read that the other way round and you have the reason inherited systems stay broken: nobody in the chain is watching. The supplier waits for a reading from you. The installer’s portal account belongs to a company that no longer works on this house. And the previous owner, who knew what a normal August looked like, has moved.
The background is the system was installed for a previous owner of the house, and is registered for FIT payments. It packed up right on New Year’s Day, but I didn’t notice until the sun came out a few days later. Unfortunately the original installer is unresponsive (may be out of business, but it’s unclear)
What the answer changes about the order of work
If the first check says the system is producing roughly what the day deserved, you have bought a working array and the rest is admin: sort out the account arrangement, tell the FIT or SEG licensee that the house has changed hands, and file the folder.
If it says the system is not producing, or producing far less than the weather justifies, the order of the paperwork changes. Fix the production first, because on a FIT system the generation reading is what you are paid on, and on any system a sunny day you lose is gone for good. Then do the transfers, with the fault already logged, dated and photographed. That is a far better position to be in when you ring a supplier or a manufacturer as somebody whose name is not yet on anything.
Either way, settle the account arrangement before you sign anything: the site in your name, the alerts going to an address you control, your production history exportable. Solmiro can then do the checking for you: every day it works out what the weather over your roof allowed, and it e-mails you when production falls well short of that or stops. Connecting is free; how it works.
One job sits outside that fork: if the roof under the panels is due work of its own, taking them off and putting them back is a separate job, and roof work with solar panels sets out what to agree before the scaffolding goes up.
The history a buyer is rarely handed
On a 6.09 kWp Enphase roof in Almere, the Augusts read 794 kWh in 2024, 780 kWh in 2025 and 755 kWh in 2026, so what a normal August looks like is on record. When the roof was connected to Solmiro on 26 August 2026, its whole history came in from the Enphase cloud in one go, back to its first day on 23 October 2023.
The daily weather check reads the same roof. In September 2026 the weather allowed 467 kWh on 28 comparable days and the roof produced 468 kWh: 100 %.
Questions owners ask
I have bought a house with solar panels on a feed-in tariff. Whose name is the FIT in?
Until someone changes it, the previous owner's. Ofgem's route for a domestic roof array — an MCS-FIT installation — is that the new owner contacts the FIT licensee the installation is registered with, which is the electricity supplier paying the tariff, and they then update the generator's details on the Central FIT Register.
Do I get paid for exported electricity automatically when I buy the house?
No. Ofgem's SEG generators page states that all generators who wish to receive payment for the electricity they export back to the National Grid need to apply to a SEG licensee. Section 1.8 of Ofgem's SEG Guidance for Generators adds that this does not need to be the same company that supplies you with electricity.
The seller left no paperwork at all. What can I do?
Ofgem's FIT guidance puts the burden on the buyer: the new generator must obtain all appropriate records from the previous FIT Generator, and in an audit must evidence eligibility from the commissioning date onwards. Where you have nothing, Ofgem's Guidance for Generators describes Ownership Register Queries for requesting information held on the Central FIT Register, with proof of identity.
The panels on my Irish house were never registered with ESB Networks. Can that be put right?
Yes. ESB Networks runs a retrospective registration process for customers who have micro-generation installed but where an NC6 form has not yet been submitted. Watch the timing: they register your MEC as of the date of receipt of an acceptable NC6 application, so nothing is backdated.
Can I get the monitoring account put into my name?
Partly, and it depends on the brand. On Enphase you set your own alerts: Menu > Account > My Notifications, then Email, Text or Push. On SolarEdge, alert e-mails need a permission that the account manager or admin sets on the site, so ask whoever holds the account. On Growatt, alerts go to the mailbox on the station record, which on an inherited system is whoever set it up, so check it in the ShineServer web portal.