Solar Panels Dorset

Solar panel installers in Dorset

DES Renewable Energy is a Dorset solar installer, based in Wimborne. Not a national firm with a Dorset postcode on the website — our team lives here, works here, and drives to your roof from a few miles down the road.

We install solar PV, battery storage and EV chargers across the whole county, and we’ve been doing it long enough to know that a roof in Weymouth and a roof in Blandford Forum are different jobs.

Why Dorset is a good place for solar

Weighing it up? Read our honest guide to the advantages and disadvantages of solar energy — including the drawbacks most installers won’t mention.

The south coast gets some of the better solar irradiance figures in the UK. That doesn’t make solar a magic bullet, but it does mean the numbers here tend to stack up more favourably than they would in the north of England or Scotland.

A few things that are specifically true of Dorset:

  • Good daylight hours. Coastal Dorset gets strong annual sunlight totals by UK standards.
  • A lot of older housing stock. Much of Bournemouth, Poole and the market towns is Victorian, Edwardian or interwar. Those roofs are often perfectly suitable, but they need proper structural assessment rather than assumptions.
  • Conservation areas everywhere. Dorset has an unusual concentration of conservation areas, listed buildings and AONB land. This genuinely affects what you can put where, and it’s the thing most often missed by installers who aren’t local.
  • Salt air. If you’re close to the coast, corrosion resistance on mounting hardware matters more than it does inland.

Choosing solar panel installers in Dorset

There are a lot of companies selling solar panels in Dorset, and they are not the same thing. Some are national firms with a Dorset phone number and a subcontracted fitting team. Some are lead generators who sell your details on. A smaller number actually install.

Whoever you speak to, these are the questions worth asking before you sign anything:

  • Are you MCS certified? Without it you cannot claim the Smart Export Guarantee, so you won’t get paid for the electricity you export. This is not optional.
  • Who actually does the solar panel installation? Ask directly whether the fitting team are employees or subcontractors. We don’t subcontract — the people on your roof are ours.
  • Is the workmanship warranty insurance-backed? A guarantee is only worth as much as the company standing behind it, and a lot of solar firms have disappeared in the last few years.
  • Have you checked my planning position? Dorset has an unusual density of conservation areas, listed buildings and AONB land. An installer who hasn’t looked at this hasn’t done the job properly.
  • Will you tell me if it’s a no? A shaded, north-facing or structurally tired roof is a bad candidate. We’d rather say so than sell you a system that underperforms for twenty-five years.

We’re a Dorset solar company in the literal sense: registered here, based here, staffed by people who live here. That’s the difference between a local installer and a national one with local advertising.

Towns we cover across Dorset

We work across the whole county. These are the areas we’re in most often, and each has its own page covering the local considerations:

Not on the list? We almost certainly still cover you. We also work across Hampshire and Wiltshire — see solar panels in Hampshire and solar panels in Wiltshire.

Planning permission in Dorset

For most Dorset homes, solar panels fall under permitted development and need no planning application — provided they don’t protrude more than 200mm from the roof plane and don’t sit above the highest part of the roof.

But Dorset has more exceptions than most counties:

  • Listed buildings need listed building consent, which is a separate process from planning. There are a lot of them here.
  • Conservation areas — panels generally can’t go on a roof slope forming the principal elevation if it fronts a highway. A rear or side roof is often still fine.
  • Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty cover a large share of rural Dorset and can carry additional restrictions.

We check all of this as part of the survey rather than leaving you to discover it afterwards. Local authorities do apply the rules differently, so we’d always confirm with yours before proceeding.

What you get from us

MCS certification. This matters practically, not just as a badge — you need an MCS-certified installation to claim the Smart Export Guarantee and get paid for the electricity you export.

NAPIT registration and RECC membership, plus an insurance-backed guarantee that protects your workmanship warranty if we were ever to cease trading. Given how many solar firms have come and gone in the last few years, that’s worth more than it sounds.

Octopus Energy Trusted Partner status. Octopus vet the installers they work with, and it opens up time-of-use tariffs that pair well with battery storage.

No subcontractors. Every install is carried out by our own team. The people on your roof are our people, and we’re accountable for their work. It’s also why we won’t promise you a date we can’t hold.

An honest answer. If your roof is heavily shaded, faces the wrong way, or needs work before it can carry a system, we’ll tell you. We’d rather lose the job than fit something that won’t perform.

What happens next

Start with a free, no-obligation quote, or have a look at our solar FAQs if you’re still weighing it up. If you’d rather talk it through, arrange a call and we’ll go through your roof, your usage and whether solar makes sense for you.

We’ll survey properly, design around your actual electricity use rather than a generic template, handle the grid notification, and be here afterwards if anything needs attention.

Further reading on solar in Dorset

We’ve written in more depth about a few of the questions that come up most often across the county: