I built a app that allows you to check your roof in the UK to check if you can get solar panels.

A friend of mine has solar panels at home with battery generation too. This seems like an absolute no brainer the more you think about it for too long.

Our house in Leytonstone, East London gets absolutely anihilated by the sun.

It keeps me up at night (too hot), so I was hoping I could at least capture the sun in the daytime to get some payback

But then it was trying to figure out if my roof is suitable or not. Whether this is all worthwhile. You know - he big questions when trying to persuade other people like my wife that it is worthwhile.

How much energy would it generate? How much would it cost? How much could we save? How much sun does our house even get month-on-month?

That last one turned out to be the question I could actually answer. July peaks at about 5.1 hours a day here; December barely manages a third of that. Roughly 68% of the year’s sunlight arrives between April and September, which is why you size a system for the whole year rather than the good bit.

It felt like the front of our house gets tonnes of sun - but what about the back? The sun moves afterall, and our house stays static. A victim to the sun.

I knew that the holy grail of gardening and sunlight is typically south facing as you tend to max the sun, but roofs at least where I live are mostly pitched.

Which means there is no single answer — there are two. A pitched roof has a front and a back, and they want different things from the sun. Ours turns out to be south-west at the front and south-east at the back, so both faces are worth having, just not equally.

I keep getting on trains or flights and seeing swathes of roofs that are just that… roofs.

Not sure on the economics of it but feels like we have to start making this easier for homeowners to understand and verify if their house is suitable for solar panels or not.

One of the coolest things is the ability to punch in and see flux values across the year.

Thats a way to check - via infrared - which faces get hot from satelitte data. Pretty amazing. You can see how the solar potential map works if you want the detail.

The biggest plan with it is to try to get people to check their roofs and ultimately for solar panels to become more common place within the UK.

Solar Panels do make sense increasingly in the UK, and as an unfortunate result of climate change I feel like Aircon too will become common place.

The best most logical way to power this to me is the thing that heats us up in the first place.

It’s not a perfect cycle but it’s better than burning fossil fuels and using a shoddy power grid…

Anyway, I hope this gives people some joy. You can check if your roof is suitable for solar panels at Solarable — it takes a postcode and a few seconds, and if it turns out yours is worth doing, there’s a directory of MCS-certified solar installers too.