Frome is a market town with a long memory. It grew rich on cloth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the weavers’ streets around Trinity and Catherine Hill still climb the slope above the River Frome in stone and clay tile. Today it is also one of the livelier small towns in the South West, with an independent high street, a busy monthly market and a lot of households thinking hard about their energy. DES Renewable Energy designs and installs solar panels, battery storage and EV chargers for homes in Frome, Beckington, Rode, Nunney, Mells, Norton St Philip, Berkley and the villages around them. We look properly at your roof before we suggest anything, because on a town like this no two roofs are alike.
Why solar works in Frome
Frome sits on the eastern edge of Somerset, close to the Wiltshire border and not far from the Mendip Hills. It is not a coastal town, but it gets a good share of the same southern England daylight that makes solar worthwhile along the Dorset coast. Panels work from daylight, not only direct sun, so a bright cloudy day still adds to your total. What matters far more than the weather is your own roof: which way it faces, how steep it is and whether trees or a neighbouring gable throw shade across it. The town is built on steep ground, so a house that looks shaded from the street can have a clear south or west roof slope at the back. We check this on a survey and model the options for you, including an east and west split for households that use most of their power early in the morning and again in the evening.
The homes and roofs we see around Frome
- Weavers’ cottages and terraces near the centre. Much of the historic core is a conservation area with many listed buildings, so we check what applies before designing anything. Where a front roof slope is not suitable, a rear slope or an outbuilding is often a better answer.
- Victorian and Edwardian family houses. Slate and tile roofs on these houses are usually straightforward to work on, and the larger loft space leaves room for a battery or a hot water diverter.
- Newer estates on the edges of town. Simple roof shapes make for a quick scaffold and a tidy fit, and these are often the easiest homes to match with a battery.
- Stone farmhouses and barn conversions in the villages. Around Nunney, Mells and Rode the roofs are bigger and the heating and hot water demand is higher. We look at roof, outbuilding and ground-mounted options and choose the one that sits best with the building.
What we install in Frome
- Solar PV installation, sized to your roof and to how your household really uses electricity through the day.
- Battery storage, so the power you make at midday can run the house after dark instead of going out to the grid.
- EV charger installation, useful for the many Frome households who drive to Bath, Bristol or Warminster and would rather charge from their own roof.
- Maintenance and repairs for existing systems, including inverter faults, bird damage and arrays that have quietly stopped performing.
Lower bills and export income
Every unit you generate and use at home is a unit you do not buy from your supplier, so the saving shows on your bill from the first bright week. A battery raises the share of your own power that you use, because the evening peak is covered from storage. Any surplus can be sold back through the Smart Export Guarantee, and as an MCS-certified installer we can register you for it. We build your estimate from your own electricity use and your own roof, and we would rather give you a cautious figure that holds up than an exciting one that does not. If you already have solar panels but no battery, we can look at adding one to your existing system.
Accredited, with our own employed teams
DES Renewable Energy is MCS-certified and NAPIT-registered. Our surveyors, roofers and electricians are our own directly employed teams, not subcontractors, so the people who design your system are the people who stand behind it. We handle the network operator notification and the registrations for you. Frome is a short drive from our Wiltshire team, and you can read about the wider area on our solar panels in Somerset and solar panels in Wiltshire pages. If you are just over the border, we also install in nearby Warminster.
Get a free solar quote in Frome
The easiest first step is a free, no-obligation quote. Tell us about your home, roughly what you spend on electricity and whether you drive an electric car, and we will come back with a proposed design and a generation estimate you can check against your own bills. Request your free quote here and talk to someone who has worked on roofs like yours.