What 368 Northern Ireland Homeowners Told Us When They Asked for Solar Quotes

Northern Ireland has decent numbers on solar supply. DESNZ publishes the installation count every month, and I track it on the NI solar installations page. Nobody publishes anything on the demand side: who is asking, what house they live in, what they are paying now, and how fast they want it done.

I have that data because I run the form. Between March 2026 and 5 September 2026, 368 people used this site to ask for solar quotes in Northern Ireland. This page is all 368 of them in aggregate, published in full, checked on 6 September 2026.

It is one website’s inbox rather than a survey of Northern Ireland. The method section at the bottom sets out what that does and does not support. Read it before you quote anything here.

The houses: 235 of 368 were detached

Property type	Requests	Share
Detached	235	63.9%
Semi-detached	81	22.0%
Bungalow	29	7.9%
Terrace	16	4.3%
Commercial	5	1.4%
Farm	2	0.5%
Total	368	100%

Nearly two thirds of everyone asking for a solar quote lives in a detached house, and adding bungalows takes it to 264 of 368 in a standalone building. Terraced houses, a large part of the housing in Belfast and Derry, produced 16 requests in six months. Only seven of the 368 were non-domestic.

Why detached houses dominate

Two things are doing the work, and neither of them is that detached owners are keener on renewables.

The first is roof geometry. A detached house has two unbroken roof planes under one owner’s control. There is usually a pitch within useful reach of south, and nothing next door throwing a shadow across half the array at four o’clock. A mid-terrace has a shorter run of roof and neighbouring rooflines close enough to matter. The detached house solar guide has the sizing detail.

The second is what the house burns for heat. NISRA’s Continuous Household Survey for 2024/25 found 61% of Northern Ireland households use oil central heating as their primary heat source, down from 70% in 2015/16 (published 11 November 2025). Oil is concentrated where the gas network is not, which is the same rural and edge-of-town geography where detached housing sits. A household buying oil by the tank already treats energy as a purchase to be managed, and it has no gas bill to switch instead. That is the group most likely to go looking for quotes, and the solar versus oil heating comparison is the arithmetic they are running.

I cannot break the oil share down by property type in my own data, because the form does not ask what heats the house. That is a change I am making.

The bills: two thirds are paying £100 to £250 a month

Monthly electricity bill	Requests	Share
£100 to £250	246	66.8%
Under £100	62	16.8%
Over £250	51	13.9%
Unsure	9	2.4%
Total	368	100%

One band holds 246 of the 368 requests. Power NI’s published domestic rates from 1 July 2026 run from 32.10p to 34.15p per kWh including VAT, depending on payment method (checked 6 September 2026). At those rates, and after the standing charge, a £175 monthly bill is roughly 6,000 kWh a year. That is the usage profile most 4kW to 6kW quotes are written for. The 62 people under £100 a month are the ones most likely to be disappointed by a payback figure, because there is less bill to remove.

Compare quotes from MCS-certified installers across NI, free, no obligation: compare quotes.

The timing: 142 wanted it inside a month

Timeline given	Requests	Share
Two to six months	111	30.2%
Only want a rough price	99	26.9%
Right away	72	19.6%
One to four weeks	70	19.0%
More than six months	16	4.3%
Total	368	100%

142 people, 38.6% of the sample, wanted the work inside a month. Another 111 were on a two to six month horizon, taking the share intending to buy within six months to 253, or 68.8%. The 99 who ticked “rough price” are worth separating out, because an installer who treats that group as a live job wastes everybody’s time. It also explains why installer diary length matters here. Nearly two in five want work done in weeks, and the market does not always have capacity for that.

What they asked for: the battery is not an add-on here

The interest field is multi-select, so one request can tick several options. 366 of the 368 recorded at least one selection, and two were left blank.

Interest	Times selected	Share of 368
Solar panels	352	95.7%
Battery storage	323	87.8%
EV charger	83	22.6%
Heat pump	36	9.8%
Commercial solar	7	1.9%

Of the 352 requests that mentioned panels, 311 also asked about a battery, which is 88.4%. Only 35 people in six months asked about panels on their own. In Northern Ireland that makes sense. There is no Smart Export Guarantee here. Suppliers pay for exported units voluntarily at roughly 5p to 8p per kWh, against an import price above 32p. Every unit you store and use yourself is worth four to six times what an exported unit earns, so the battery carries more of the payback case here than in Great Britain. The NI home battery brands guide covers what people are being quoted.

The EV charger number is the one I did not expect. 83 requests, better than one in five, wanted charging in the same conversation as the panels. Solar panels and electric cars explains why the two keep arriving together.

The volume: month by month

Month	Requests
March 2026	61
April 2026	70
May 2026	71
June 2026	57
July 2026	67
August 2026	36
September 2026 (1st to 5th)	6
Total	368

The six complete months averaged 60 requests, holding between 57 and 71 from March through July. August fell to 36, a drop of 46% on July. I am not presenting that as Northern Ireland losing interest in solar. There is a simpler explanation. This site lost a large share of its Google visibility in the August 2026 spam update, so fewer people reached the form. A demand figure taken from one website’s traffic moves when that traffic moves. Treat March to July as the reliable part of this series and August as contaminated.

For scale, DESNZ recorded 328 new solar installations across all of Northern Ireland in March 2026. My form took 61 requests that month.

What this means if you are getting quotes

If you live in a detached house with a bill in the £100 to £250 band, you are the middle of this distribution, and every installer in NI has priced your job many times. Ask three of them for the same system size and compare the line items rather than the totals. Quotes for identical systems routinely differ by more than £1,000, as the cost guide sets out.

If you are in a terrace, you are in the 4.3%. Fewer installers have your job fresh in their minds and the roof survey matters more, so allow longer and expect wider variation.

If you are pricing a battery you are with the 88%, not doing something unusual. Get it quoted as a separate line so you can see what it adds.

Before you commit, the Solar Today tracker publishes measured daily generation for seven NI towns, so you can see what a roof here makes.

Method and limits

What the data is. Every quote request submitted through the comparesolarni.com enquiry form between March 2026 and 5 September 2026. n=368, exported from the production database on 6 September 2026.

What the form asks. Property type from a fixed list, monthly electricity bill as a band, purchase timeline from a fixed list, and interests as a multi-select. All of it is self-reported and none of it is verified against a bill, a deed or a survey.

Not a probability sample. These are people who found one website and chose to complete a form. There is no sampling frame, no weighting and no control group. It describes NI homeowners actively shopping for solar in 2026, not NI households.

No geography. The form captures a postcode, but every row in this export resolved to a Belfast BT prefix. That is a capture artefact in how the field is stored, not a finding about where demand is. There is no geographic breakdown on this page, and there will not be one until the field is fixed.

Excluded. No individual is identifiable and no row-level data is published. Names, contact details and free-text messages are excluded entirely. Two requests recorded no interest selection. They are counted in the 368 and excluded from the interest table, which is built from the 366 requests that recorded at least one option. Because that field is multi-select, its counts do not sum to 366.

Dates. The first request in this export is in March 2026, so nothing here covers January or February, and August is affected by the traffic drop described above.

Tariff note. The bill-to-usage conversion above uses Power NI’s published domestic rates from 1 July 2026, 32.10p to 34.15p per kWh including VAT. The Solar Today tracker uses a separate 33.5p assumption for its savings figures.

Cite this page

Compare Solar NI, NI Solar Quote Request Data 2026, comparesolarni.com/guides/what-ni-homeowners-want-from-solar-2026/, accessed 6 September 2026.

If you are a journalist or researcher and want a figure that is not on this page, ask me. I will run it if the aggregate is large enough to publish without identifying anybody, and I will publish the answer here rather than send it privately.