Solar Panel Installation
in Cheshunt

Broxbourne Borough Council's 2018 Churchgate heritage leaflet says that, at the time of the Domesday survey, Chestrehunt was a small manorial settlement on the site of modern Churchgate. Designated a conservation area in 1968, Churchgate was one of the first historic centres in Britain to receive that status. The leaflet says 23 buildings in it are listed, including the Grade I Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin, built between 1418 and 1448, and the Bishops' College complex, which is Grade II listed as a whole. National permitted development rules do not restrict panels on roof slopes in a conservation area. The restriction is on panels fixed to a wall, balcony or roof enclosure that fronts a highway, and a flat-roof array needs a prior approval application first. Practical implication: near Churchgate we confirm the conservation area boundary and your home's listing status before drawing up a layout.

Broxbourne's Local Plan 2018-2033, adopted on 23 June 2020, records the Churchgate Conservation Area as being on Historic England's Heritage at Risk Register. The same plan proposes approximately 75 new homes at Bishops' College in Churchgate, through conversion and redevelopment. It says proposals should conserve the setting, character and appearance of the listed buildings and conservation area, including the New River. The national permitted development conditions for solar on houses make no reference to the Heritage at Risk Register, so an unlisted house's roof slopes are judged against the same national limits unless an Article 4 Direction applies. Practical implication: for an unlisted Churchgate house we design within the national limits. Where a listed building or a wall-mounted array fronting a highway means an application is needed, we tell you at the quote stage rather than after installation.

In 2021 Broxbourne Borough Council announced it would use an Article 4 Direction to protect key employment sites. Converting offices to homes at those sites would need full planning permission, and the council expected the direction to come into force on 28 March 2022. The direction on its website is dated 15 November 2021. The sites named include Cheshunt Business Park on Delamare Road and Fieldings Road. The direction is about change of use, not solar panels. The Local Plan separately proposes Cheshunt Lakeside, a development of approximately 1,750 new homes on land at Delamare Road. Practical implication: a Cheshunt homeowner's roof is judged against the national permitted development limits unless the home is listed or an Article 4 Direction covers its street. A business on Delamare Road should check the building's planning position and any redevelopment timetable before committing to a long-life array.

Census 2021 figures for the Borough of Broxbourne, which includes Cheshunt, count 39,850 households. Of those, 29,350, about 74%, live in houses: 6,102 detached, 11,538 semi-detached and 11,710 terraced. Another 9,189, about 23%, live in purpose-built blocks of flats. On tenure, 27,357 households, about 69%, own their home outright or with a mortgage, 6,367, about 16%, rent privately, and 5,683 rent from the council or another social landlord. These figures cover the whole borough, not just Cheshunt, but they show that most households live in a house rather than a flat. Practical implication: owners of houses can usually go straight to a roof survey, while tenants and flat owners should first get consent from whoever owns the roof, which we build into the timetable.

We ran PVGIS, the European Commission Joint Research Centre's solar model, for the centre of the EN8 postcode district with standard 14% system losses. A 35-degree, south-facing roof is modelled at about 1,016kWh a year per kWp, an east-facing roof at 817kWh and a west-facing roof at 789kWh, so east and west slopes come out at roughly 80% and 78% of south. Ten AIKO 485W panels (4.85kWp) on a south slope would be modelled at roughly 4,900kWh a year before shading. Ofgem's October to December 2026 price cap puts the average electricity unit rate at 26.32p per kWh for Direct Debit customers. That is a GB average and varies by region. Outgoing Octopus pays 12p per kWh exported. Practical implication: east and west roofs are still worth surveying, and because a unit used at home is worth more than one exported, we size the system around your daytime use.