The brand and model number get us started, or a photograph of the data label if the print has worn off. Say what the unit is doing wrong and give us your WF postcode. If the roof is stone flag or pantile, or the address falls in one of the district's conservation areas, mention it: that changes what we turn up prepared for, not what it costs.
Book replacementDiagnose first — free if we can't fixAmazing! I was having trouble with a flat GivEnergy battery and solar panels not working. I contacted through WhatsApp and we managed to get it all sorted within a couple of days! Super fast service. I can’t thank you enough for your help when my installer didn’t want to know and GivEnergy has gone in to administration! I know where to go if anything happens again!
Very very helpfuland so quick. Made sure that a non expert like myself understood what the problem was and how to resolve it.
Made contact for assistance with my GiveEnergy battery that wasn't discharging. Ronald looked at my issue the same day, identified the root cause with a clear explanation of what was going on along with some options on how to remediate the issue. So far my battery is now working and keeping my fingers crossed that it stays this way. Ronald is a very experienced and knowledgeable engineer and I would recommend.
Excellent response to diagnose a problem on our SolarEdge installation. Kept us informed at every step. Diagnosis quickly completed and solution implemented.
I work for a Solar Company and had a customer with a GivEnergy system that we are not versed in. Ron took the time to explain the issues my customer was having and between us managed to rectify the issues. 10 Stars ... Thanks again STS
Solar Tech have been everything you expect and want from a support organisation. Easy to contact, quick to respond and their expertise and knowledge about GivEnergy Systems was amazing. All the work was done remotely, and they guided me through the recovery of a failed system, which ended up to be down to a physically damaged USB key installed in production that was corrupted and stopping one battery from working, locking the whole system. All fixed and the system is working again. Massive thanks to the team and their help. Will be my goto for any future issues with our GivEnergy system. The pictures shows the condition of the USB as installed..
Wakefield Council adopted its District Design Code on 16 June 2026. Appendix 5 divides the district into local historic character areas and gives each one its own material palette.
For the city centre and northern suburbs it names Pennine Coal Measures sandstone for high-status and visibly older buildings, red brick with stone detailing for the majority of buildings, coursed stonework rather than rubble, and simple terrace forms for housing.
With Welsh and Westmoreland slate, the covering the Design Code gives to Gawthorpe, Ossett, Horbury, Middlestown, Netherton and Durkar
Slate punctuated by stone chimney stacks characterises the northern coalfield roofscape, from Castleford through to Pontefract
Set alongside stone slate and Welsh or Westmorland slate in the Went River Basin, around Ackworth, Badsworth and Nostell
Two conservation area appraisals published in March 2026 make the same point street by street in the city centre.
On the north side of Westgate and Little Westgate the council records buildings traditionally roofed with stone flags, some of them since re-roofed in Welsh slate. On Kirkgate it records red brick, sometimes painted or rendered, with stone-flagged roofs.
Bread Street it describes as traditional swept stone flagged pitched roofs. Yet the listed group at 2 to 10 Northgate, in the same conservation area, is red brick with Welsh slate roofs.
One small city-centre area, then, is mixed rather than uniform, and the appraisal does not count how many buildings still hold their stone flags. Neither will we, before looking.
Our own aggregation of the 2021 census ward figures, taking the five wards that carry the Wakefield name, gives 35,578 households: 15,071 semi-detached (42.4%), 7,146 detached (20.1%), 6,482 terraced (18.2%) and 5,793 in purpose-built flats (16.3%).
That matters for one practical reason. On a semi the meter and consumer unit tend to sit on the party-wall side or in a hall cupboard, with the array on a rear or side pitch, and that is the arrangement we expect to offer a compliant inverter position most readily. It is our working expectation, not a rule.
One honest gap in all of that. We went through the district's adopted appraisals and the Design Code appendix looking for how any covering is pegged, lapped or battened, and found nothing. Wakefield names its materials but not its fixings, so that part gets settled on the roof.
The badge on the wall is an accident of who was knocking on doors the year the array went up. The job around it is not.
Read the DESNZ end-2024 deployment table against its own household estimates and Wakefield comes out ahead of the other four West Yorkshire districts on installations per household: 9,491 against roughly 153,100 households.
In the same table, 5,052 of those 9,491, some 53%, were already on the record at end-2014. We read that as a fleet that is both large for the district's size and well past its first decade.
The better-built end of that older fleet, and the ones that most often turn up orphaned. Plenty of the feed-in-tariff-boom local installers are no longer trading, so a lot of the systems we get called to have nobody left behind them.
The consequence here is that the record has to be rebuilt before anything is ordered. We establish the string layout, the DC voltage window and where the isolators really are, because the handover pack usually went with the company. Recovering lost documentation →
The volume string brands from the same selling years, and the ones we see fail most.
The consequence here is where the box has been living. If the unit sits in a loft or an attached garage, its position is doing something the datasheet never assumed: a loft in August is not the ambient a hallway wall offers.
So we check the replacement's ventilation clearance and its high-temperature derating against that position, and move the position if it cannot support the unit.
GivEnergy is the retrofit battery brand we meet most often, bolted onto feed-in-tariff arrays years after the panels went up. What presents as dead hardware turns out often enough to be a firmware state, a CT clamp reading the wrong conductor, or a comms fault. All three get ruled out before anyone pays for a box.
The consequence here is the run between the meter and the inverter. A hybrid needs its CT clamp at the incoming supply, with a lead run back to wherever the unit ends up, and on a semi the meter position tends to choose the inverter position rather than the other way round.
Where it really has died, the replacement is a single supplied-and-installed figure. GivEnergy in Yorkshire →
The optimiser systems we get called to sit on the awkward, overshadowed roofs, where a plain string inverter would have spent every afternoon dragged down by whichever corner was in shade.
The consequence here is which covering somebody has to lift. A dead inverter is dealt with indoors and nothing on the roof gets touched. A dead optimiser is not, and lifting stone flags is a different operation from lifting pantiles or a shallow pitch slate roof.
Which of the two you are facing is something we establish remotely, before a quote exists. Sunsynk, Huawei, Enphase, Fox ESS and SolaX are handled the same way. Full service details →
Single-phase, 2–6 kW, supplied and installed. The route for the ageing string units on the district's older arrays, specified against the panel string rather than against the old badge.
Swapping a failed string unit for a battery-ready hybrid. We confirm what the storage addition needs from the network before fixing the figure. For GivEnergy there is a single supplied-and-installed price instead.
Everything above 8 kW, plus three-phase units, quoted individually once we have seen the supply arrangement and the array it has to serve. Full pricing details →
Nothing on that table is a labour-only rate. Hardware, removal, install, commissioning, the notification and the written report all sit inside the figure.
Neither a stone flag roof nor a conservation-area address moves that figure. What they move is the sequence of the job: the mounting position, and the access method if the covering has to come up, get settled in writing while there is still time to change them.
Wakefield Council designates 31 conservation areas across the district, a figure we checked in August 2026. Eight carry the Wakefield name: Cathedral, Lower Westgate, Upper Westgate, South Parade, St Johns, Wentworth Terrace, Wood St and Wakefield Waterfront.
The list moves. Castleford, and Felkirk and Hodroyd, were newly designated at Cabinet on 17 February 2026, alongside boundary amendments to Ossett and Wood Street, with a revised Horbury boundary approved on 17 March 2026.
Which is why the adopted Local Plan is the wrong place to look this up. Its schedule still lists 29 areas, CA01 to CA29, and it was adopted on 24 January 2024. Accurate for the date it carries, stale as a live count.
Only three of the district's areas appear on the council's Article 4 list: Heath in Wakefield, designated as a conservation area on 14 March 1972; St Johns in Wakefield, designated on 25 May 1968; and Whitwood Terrace in Castleford.
Our working expectation follows from that. A Direction reaching the alteration of a dwelling house is worth a call before we fix anything to an outside wall at one of those addresses; at the other twenty-eight, an indoor swap is not that conversation.
If a stone flag, slate or pantile covering is being repaired or replaced, dealing with a tired inverter in the same visit means paying for access once instead of twice.
Remove and reinstall details →For when you want the whole system assessed rather than one failed unit: condition, safety, performance and what actually needs doing, written down and brand-neutral.
Inspection details → Book inverter replacementEverywhere inside the district, priced identically and booked on identical lead times.
Worth knowing before anyone assumes a Wakefield inverter job is a Victorian one. Aggregating the council tax stock rows up to 2022 wards, our reading puts Castleford Central and Glasshoughton at roughly 3,840 of about 8,810 dwellings built before 1919, near 44%, against 15.4% district-wide.
So the oldest fabric is concentrated out in Castleford rather than in the city, which is not where most people expect it, and the survey questions move with it.
The Design Code has its own clause on photovoltaics, B2.7.1. It asks that PVs be integrated into the building's design without visual disruption, offering flush-set panels, matching PV tiles and neat alignment with roof elements, and that added height be considered against local views and roofline appearance.
On listed buildings, and on sites within or next to conservation areas, it points to Historic England's Advice Note 18.
Read its status precisely, though. The g suffix on that clause is the document's own marker for guidance, which it defines as not mandatory but strongly encouraged, and the Code is a material consideration when a planning application is being determined.
Our reading is that it has nothing to say to a like-for-like inverter swap on an existing home, because no application is being determined. It is worth knowing about if you are adding panels rather than replacing a box.
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Photograph the data label if you can reach it, and tell us what the unit is doing or refusing to do. We work out what the array actually needs, price it in writing, and give you a date. Mention the roof covering and whether the address falls in a conservation area while you are at it.
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