Your solar panel company has gone bust: who's watching your system now?

Your solar panel company has gone bust, but your equipment did not stop working when the company did. What stopped is the watching: the monitoring account was almost certainly opened in the installer’s name, the fault alerts were pointed at their mailbox, and that mailbox is now closed. The manufacturer warranties on your panels and inverter are an agreement with the manufacturer rather than with the installer (the installer’s own guarantee is the part with nobody left to honour it), but you can only use the manufacturer side if you hold the serials and the paperwork. Your consumer rights are a separate matter. The question here is who is watching your solar inverter now, and how to get the account back into your own name.

What happens when your solar company goes out of business in the UK or Ireland

Three separate things break at once, and they are usually confused with each other.

1. The workmanship guarantee. Nobody is left to honour it. A UK owner named the pattern on the MoneySavingExpert forum in 2017, and it has aged well.
2. The service relationship. No callout number, no engineer who knows your roof. In a 2025 MoneySavingExpert thread an owner whose system failed after thirteen months reported being quoted £99 + VAT for the first hour and £59 + VAT for each hour after that, simply to come and test it. That is one reported price, not an average.
3. The monitoring. This is the one that gets missed. The portal account, the site record and the alert recipient address were normally set up by the installer at commissioning, in the installer’s name.

There have been several posts from people who have a problem with their installation and have found that the installation firm has ceased trading. This issue will doubtless increase as the years roll by. … Firms will hardly stay in business simply to honour their warranty.

You will meet several words for the same event: gone bust, ceased trading, gone into administration, liquidation, receivership. The difference matters to creditors, and to anyone chasing a refund. For the monitoring it makes none: whichever word applies, nobody is reading the mailbox the alerts were sent to.

The third one is what turns a solvable problem into an expensive one. A fault you hear about on the day costs a day. A fault nobody is watching for costs whatever the season gives it.

We had solar panels installed in 2015 and everything was fine until February 2018. Then we received an email saying that our system had generated no electricity in the last 24 hours. Since then we have been checking the meter daily and, indeed, there are days when it does not generate. … Unfortunately Solarking, the people who installed it, are no longer trading

My solar panel company has gone bust — is my warranty gone too?

Your panel and inverter warranties are a contract between you and the manufacturer, so they do not disappear with the installer. The installer’s own workmanship guarantee does, because nobody is left to honour it. To claim, you need the serials and the paperwork listed below, and your handover pack shows what else was issued.

Owners meet that split even where the installer is still trading. A UK owner whose Solax inverter had shown no display and a red light for six months wrote on the MoneySavingExpert forum in 2025 that “The installer only gives 2 yr warranty so I was advised to contact Solax direct” (thread). When the installer is gone, that manufacturer route is the only one left.

Your rights against the failed company, and any guarantee issued alongside the installation, are a matter for whoever issued that paperwork. Neither of them puts the monitoring back on.

The paperwork the manufacturer route needs

Collect this now, while the roof is dry and you still have the folder. None of it lives at the installer any more.

• Inverter model and serial number, photographed off the label on the unit itself.
• Panel model and count, and the optimiser or microinverter model if you have them.
• Commissioning date, and the original invoice or contract showing what was bought.
• Any certification and grid-connection paperwork you were given at handover.
• Your current meter reading, generation and export, with the date. It is the only baseline you own.

Taking the monitoring account back, brand by brand

An owner login usually shows you production, and the administrative controls (who owns the site, who receives alerts, which alert rules are on) sit at a role level the installer held. That is why “just reset the password” does not work.

SolarEdge

SolarEdge’s alert system is built for installers.

• Only users with the account manager or account admin role can create, edit or enable alert rules. A homeowner login cannot.
• Even e-mail alerts to you need a permission set on the installer’s side: Admin → Site Access → your user → “Expose to alerts notifications”.

You cannot change any of this from the app. Open a support ticket with SolarEdge, with the inverter serial and your commissioning paperwork to hand. While you wait, note that even a fully configured SolarEdge site only flags lost communication after at least three hours, and by default in a daily roll-up.

More on the codes and states you will see once you are in: SolarEdge error codes and the SolarEdge monitoring page.

Enphase

Enphase gives the owner the most useful notification settings of the three. The owner-side notification path is Menu → Account → My Notifications, where the default is “Receive only recommended notifications” and the channels are email, text and push; texts need a registered mobile number. Change the address there and you are at least on the list.

The published thresholds are wide: a microinverter that stops reporting for 12 hours of daylight produces an in-app warning and no push at all, and a notification requires at least 10% of the microinverters silent for five consecutive days. On an eleven-panel roof, one dead microinverter is 9%, which keeps it under the bar indefinitely. Enphase also names the same condition two different ways: Production Issue in the Installer Portal, Low Solar Production in the app.

Per-panel alert notifications are, in Enphase’s own words, “one of the benefits of the Enphase Installer Portal”, so getting them on your own site is an Enphase support question. What a not-reporting condition means panel by panel is in Enphase microinverter not reporting. See also the Enphase monitoring page.

Growatt

Growatt’s homeowner app is a viewer. Its alerts are three e-mail tick-boxes in the ShineServer web portal (alerts, daily reports, monthly reports), sent to the mailbox entered when the plant was created. At commissioning that is normally the installer’s.

That makes Growatt the easiest of the three to reason about and the least forgiving in practice: whoever can edit the station record controls the alerts, and if the plant sits under the installer’s ShineServer account, that is not you. Automatic fault detection is sold in ShineTools, the installer app, a tier that was never yours.

Codes you may meet on the way: Growatt error codes 203 and 117, and the Growatt monitoring page.

If you never had a login at all

This is common, and none of it is your fault. A UK owner who bought a house with panels ran into the circular version of it:

For signing up they say everywhere that my installer has to do this for me, but I have no information on the installer.

That is the loop: the site record was opened in the installer’s name, and the sign-up route the owner above was pointed at ran back through an installer they could not identify. The way out is the manufacturer’s own support: photograph the inverter or gateway serial label, put whatever commissioning paperwork you have beside it, and open a ticket with the brand. The checks that need no login at all are in how do I know if my solar panels are working.

What to check before you hand the watching to anyone else

Whatever comes next (a new installer’s service plan, a brand’s premium tier, an independent service), settle the account arrangement before you sign rather than after. Three things decide whether you end up in the same position again: the account is in your name with your email as the owner, the alerts go to an address you control, and you can leave and take your production history with you.

What the installer’s “free monitoring” actually was

It was a person occasionally glancing at a dashboard, on top of an alert system built for fleets.

SolarEdge has no alert that compares your output with what you should have made. Its production alerts only fire on hard faults: “Production issue – inverter overheated” and “String is not producing”. A system that is up and communicating but producing only a fraction of what it should raises nothing at all.

Enphase, as above, batches by design and never notifies on a single dead panel on any array of eleven panels or more. Growatt’s homeowner app markets no alerting at all.

So “we monitor it for you” was, at best, a human habit, and the habit ended with the company. Solmiro replaces the habit with a daily check: every day it works out what the weather over your roof allowed, and it e-mails you when production falls well short of that or stops. Connecting is free. Where your alerts were going until now is set out in who gets your solar alerts.

Solar companies that have gone bust: the dated record

This is the record as it stands, not a prediction about anyone still trading.

GivEnergy administration: the case worth holding in mind

Even if you own none of their hardware, note that GivEnergy’s trading company and the company running its app were not the same legal entity. An installer’s promise and a brand’s cloud can each fail on their own.

What the silence costs while you sort it out

The export income is the part you can put a number on, because Ofgem publishes the totals.

Two rules make the loss permanent rather than recoverable. FIT payments are based on the meter readings you submit, and Octopus puts the consequence in one line: “we can’t make FiT payments based on estimated or inverter readings”. If the generation meter itself breaks, Octopus says that as the outright owner you need to contact a local engineer. In Ireland the Clean Export Guarantee pays per metered exported kWh, so the credit simply shrinks on the bill, which is the easiest thing in the world not to notice.

Which?’s April 2024 member survey of more than 2,000 owners found 15% had experienced inverter problems, the most common technical issue reported.

We had our solar array installed in 2011, so receiving the fit generation payment … The installer has long since gone bust. Everything has been working fine until recently when I realised the reading at the PV meter is the same as the last time I read it.

Who to call for the physical work

For anything on the roof or inside the inverter you now need a local electrician or solar contractor rather than a warranty department. Owners report these prices: £700 fitted for a Growatt replacement inverter, in a 2025 thread about an SMA that died after nearly fourteen years; a SolarEdge swap quoted at £2,600 including VAT in a 2023 thread. Those are two reported prices, not an average, so treat them as an order of magnitude. If the job is the roof rather than the kit (a re-cover that needs the panels off and back on), roof work with solar panels covers who does which part, and what to check once they are back up.

When something is actually not producing rather than merely not reporting, work through the inverter offline triage before you book anyone. Plenty of what looks like a dead system is a dead datalogger (the monitoring link, not the inverter).