Why this exists
The UK has spent twenty years getting good at putting panels on the roofs of houses. It has done almost nothing for the millions of households that live in a flat, or rent, or both. For those people the entire solar industry consists of a quote form that asks what kind of roof you have and then stops being interested.
Germany fixed this by making a plug-in balcony system something a tenant can buy on a Saturday, and over a million households did. The UK has not, and the gap between those two facts is the whole reason this business exists.
What we will not tell you
That it is as good as roof solar. It is not — a 3 kW roof array generates about five times as much and gets paid for its surplus, and we put that comparison on our own homepage rather than hiding it.
That you will get paid for what you export. You will not. A balcony system is not MCS or Flexi-Orb certified, so it is not eligible for the Smart Export Guarantee, and any seller showing you an export line is showing you money that will not arrive.
That you have to pay us to connect it. Until 27 August 2026 we could say an electrician was legally required; now a compliant kit can be plugged in, so we argue the fitted price on what it actually buys and publish the arithmetic — including the bit where the gap is about £264 rather than £450. See what changed.
That it will keep your lights on in a power cut, that the VAT deadline means you must decide this week, or that we are certified for something we are not.
How we work out the numbers
The same way a certified installer has to: MCS standard MIS 3002 Appendix B for generation, off the vertical-array irradiance table rather than the roof one, and MCS MGD 003 for how much of it you actually use. We are not MCS certified for this product — nobody is, the scheme does not cover it — but using its method means our figures can be checked against a published standard instead of taken on trust.
Prices come from a published cost model rather than a salesperson’s judgement of what you will pay. That is why the same number appears on the homepage, the pricing page and the estimator.
Who we are
Solar Balcony is a trading name of PlugSun Ltd, registered in Scotland, company number SC884455. PlugSun is a domestic solar and EV installer working across the east of Scotland, and Solar Balcony is what it does for the households a roof system cannot reach.
That is worth stating plainly rather than burying, because it is what makes the roof comparison on this site legitimate. When we put a 3 kW roof system next to a balcony one and the roof wins on every number, those are our own published prices in both columns — not a competitor’s, chosen to flatter us.
Where we fit
Anywhere in Scotland. Fife, Angus and East Lothian are the area we work week to week, because that is what the crew can reach from its base in Central Scotland. Everywhere else we go in batches: we group bookings by area and travel when there are enough in one place to make the run worth doing.
That is not a fudge, it is the only honest way to serve this market. The flats balcony solar exists for are mostly in the tenement cities, not in the three council areas we work week to week — so either we travel, or we sell a product to people who cannot buy it. What batching costs you is time, not money: the price is the same wherever you are, and we tell you how many bookings are ahead of you before you commit to anything.
We do not fit outside Scotland. The estimator still works for any UK postcode, because the MCS tables are UK-wide, so use it to decide whether balcony solar is worth it and then find someone local.
The number is 2. Two bookings in one area and we come. That is low on purpose — a threshold you cannot picture is the same as no promise at all, and at two you can reasonably go and find the other person yourself. Plenty of our runs will be a neighbour and a stranger who both happened to ask in the same month.
And nobody waits more than a week. If two bookings have not appeared in your area by then, one of three things happens: we come for you alone, we give you a firm date further out, or we tell you plainly we are not going to make it. What we will not do is leave you on a list indefinitely while the number never quite adds up.
Talk to us
sales@plugsun.co.uk — a real person replies, usually within a working day. It is a PlugSun address because, as above, that is who we are; balcony enquiries land in the same inbox and are answered by the same people.