Solar & Battery for Holiday Lets — Power the Hot Tub, Guest EV & Evening Demand

Yes, arguably more than for a year-round home. Your busiest, highest-earning months of April to October are also the sunniest, so in-season self-consumption is high: the hot tub, the hot-water re-heat at each changeover and guest EV charging all draw power when the panels generate most. In the quiet winter you export to the grid under the Smart Export Guarantee, earning on power you would not have used anyway. We overlay your occupancy calendar on the generation curve so you can see the seasonal match before deciding.

Largely, in season, and the hot tub is usually the single biggest electrical load on a holiday let. A tub kept hot and filtered for back-to-back guests draws a 2 to 3 kW heater, much of it during the day, which solar can cover directly. Pairing the array with a battery lets you store midday sun to keep the tub hot into the evening and overnight for new arrivals, instead of buying peak-rate grid electricity. The hot tub is often what turns a marginal payback into a good one.

Yes, and it is one of the strongest cases for holiday-let solar. Daytime guest charging absorbs solar at near-100% self-consumption, and a battery lets guests charge from stored solar in the evening without straining your supply. A charge point is also a genuine listing selling point, as EV-driving guests actively filter for it. For a small park or multi-lodge site, the OZEV Workplace Charging Scheme can help fund the sockets.

Usually, yes. The loads that define a holiday let (the hot tub, the evening hot-water re-heat and evening guest EV charging) largely fall outside peak sun, so a battery that stores midday generation and releases it after dark is where much of the return comes from. We size the battery to your actual in-season load pattern rather than fitting a default, and model the payback with and without it so you can see the difference.

The rules changed. The Furnished Holiday Lettings regime, which let holiday lets claim capital allowances on plant like solar, was abolished from 6 April 2025 (1 April 2025 for companies). If you hold the property personally you can no longer write the panels down as plant and machinery. If the let is held in a limited company, solar may still be qualifying plant, depending on its structure. We are not tax advisers, so please take your own tax advice, and check the gov.uk guidance, but we will not pretend the old FHL allowances still apply.

0% VAT on qualifying domestic-scale solar and battery runs to 31 March 2027 in Great Britain. However, it is a residential relief, and its application to a property run purely as a commercial holiday let is not clear-cut. Confirm your specific position, and take your own tax advice, before relying on it.

Usually, with care. Roof-mounted PV on a dwelling is often permitted development, but not on a wall or roof fronting a highway in a conservation area, and listed buildings always need Listed Building Consent. We favour discreet, non-highway-facing roof slopes or screened ground-mount, and provide the visual-impact detail the authority expects. Many cottages, lodges and glamping sites in the Lake District, Eryri, Pembrokeshire, Cornwall and the Dales already run solar successfully.

This is where solar-plus-battery shines. Rather than paying a DNO for a slow, expensive grid extension to a remote field, a solar-and-battery system can power your lighting, hot water, pods and shower block directly. We size the storage to carry the site overnight and through cloudy spells, and can add a small backup generator for worst-case weeks. On off-grid sites this is often dramatically cheaper and faster than a grid connection, and sizing for self-consumption only avoids a G99 export application altogether.

We plan around your calendar. Roof work is contained and usually done in a changeover gap or your quiet season, so guests are unaffected. The only unavoidable outage is the short final grid connection, a few hours, which we book for an empty period. For a small park, we schedule the more disruptive work outside your peak season entirely.