Short enough to read once and worth reading before you order rather than after.
| Case | Condition |
|---|---|
| Pitched roof | Below the ridge, projecting no more than 200 mm |
| Flat roof | No more than 600 mm above the roof |
| Wall abutting a highway | Projecting no more than 200 mm |
| Other walls | Projecting no more than 400 mm |
| Wooden wall, balcony, timber cladding | Not covered for plug-in solar, on either building type |
| Conservation area, World Heritage Site | Nothing on a highway-fronting wall |
| Listed building grounds, scheduled monument | Outside the right |
Planning Portal guidance, read 13 September 2026. A listed building itself needs planning permission and listed building consent, with pre-application advice recommended.
The transitional year runs to 27 August 2027. Until then the conditions that applied immediately before the change may be used instead of the new ones, so two contradictory answers about a timber surface can both be defensible right now.
The question worth asking anyone advising you is simply which set they are using, and what they expect to happen to your installation when the older set expires.
We hold the published guidance but not the amending order that sits behind it. Until we do, everything on this page is attributed as guidance rather than quoted as statute, and the exact statutory wording of the timber exclusion stays an open item on our own list.
Falling outside the right does not make the device unlawful to own or to use. It removes the shortcut. What would have been a Saturday afternoon becomes an application to the council, with the time and the fee that implies, and that is a materially different proposition from the one the packaging describes.
The balcony entry in the index covers the specific case, and the entry on frames covers the arrangement that avoids the argument.