Somebody put solar panels on your roof. It was probably a good decision, and it was almost certainly signed off in finance or estates rather than by anybody who thinks about fire. Here is the question worth asking: has your fire risk assessment been looked at once since the scaffolding came down?
What happened
On 10 August 2026 the insurer QBE published research based on Freedom of Information requests it made to UK fire and rescue services in February. It found that fires involving solar panels rose 133% over four years, from 91 incidents in 2022 to 212 in 2025, while the number of installations rose by 52% over the same period.
The trend matters more than the headline. Fires went 91, then 131, then 155, then 212, and those spreading beyond the installation and into the building rose from 33 to 88. They are becoming more common and more serious at the same time.
Split by property type, 2025 gave 102 fires in residential premises, 48 in commercial premises, up from 33 and a rise of 46%, and 14 in industrial premises, up from 6. Solar farms, on 14, were the only category that fell.
The leading cause is not the panel. DC cabling and connectors caused 49 fires in 2025, roughly double the 26 recorded in 2024. The panel itself accounted for 36, battery banks for 23 and inverters for 19. Adrian Simmonds, a risk manager at QBE, tied the cabling figure to installation quality, pointing at loose connections and damaged wires producing arc faults. Fire Safety Matters reported the research on 17 August.
Why the commercial numbers are the ones to watch
Residential is the biggest absolute number and it will get all the coverage. If you are responsible for a warehouse, a distribution shed, a retail park or a factory, the numbers that concern you are 48 and 14, and specifically the direction they are moving in.
Commercial and industrial arrays are bigger, carry longer DC runs, are almost never walked on by anybody except the installer, and sit on roofs signed off before anybody thought about mounting an electrical generating plant on them. A domestic array is fifteen panels above a bedroom. A distribution centre array can be several thousand panels above a single undivided fire compartment holding stock worth more than the building.
Then there is the part that makes this a fire safety problem rather than an electrical one. A rooftop DC fault starts in the one place where nobody is looking, nobody is standing, and your detection almost certainly does not reach. By the time anything inside the building notices, the fire has had a long head start, and it is above the ceiling rather than below it.
The document most building owners have never read
There is a free, industry-agreed guide to this, and hardly anyone in the FM world has opened it.
RC62, Recommendations for fire safety with photovoltaic panel installations, is published by the Fire Protection Association and was developed with RISCAuthority, the Microgeneration Certification Scheme and Solar Energy UK. The current version dates from February 2023 and, unusually, it is written for commercial and industrial rooftop installations rather than for houses. Gemini is an FPA member, and this is one of the documents that earns its place on a desk.
Its most useful recommendation is also its least technical. RC62 says the existing fire risk assessment should be reviewed both before and after a PV system is installed, to account for the hazards it introduces.
That is the sentence to act on, because in practice it almost never happens. The solar project runs through a different budget, a different contractor and a different part of the organisation from the one holding the fire file. The array goes up, the assessment stays as it was, and the building’s safety documentation now describes a roof that no longer exists.
What to check
Start with the paperwork, because it is free and it tells you where you stand.
Find the date of your last fire risk assessment and compare it to the date the array was energised. If the assessment is older, it does not describe your building. A PV installation is a material alteration, and a material alteration is a review trigger.
Ask who has physically inspected the DC side since commissioning. Not the monitoring portal, which reports yield rather than connector condition, but an inspection against BS EN IEC 62446-1, the standard covering documentation, commissioning tests and inspection of grid connected PV. If the answer is nobody, the leading cause of solar fires is sitting unexamined on your roof.
Confirm the firefighting arrangements. RC62 calls for switches allowing firefighters to remotely isolate the DC side, placed somewhere safe and reachable. If your fire and rescue service turned up tonight, could they kill the array without going on the roof?
Look at where your battery storage lives, if you have any, and at what actually detects a fire in the inverter or battery room. That is usually a plant room which got detection because the drawing said so, not because anybody assessed what is in it now.
How Gemini can help
To be clear about the boundary: Gemini does not install, inspect or maintain solar arrays. Use an MCS certificated PV contractor for the array itself.
What Gemini does is the fire side of the same problem. We do not carry out fire risk assessments ourselves: we introduce independent assessors we have worked with for years, and we offer a free second-opinion review of the assessment you already hold, which is the quickest way to find out whether it has caught up with your roof. We design and install fire detection for inverter rooms, switchrooms and battery enclosures, including wireless detection where cabling a live plant area is impractical, and alarm monitoring so that a fire in an unoccupied plant room at three in the morning reaches somebody.
We work across warehouses and storage units and energy generation and distribution sites. If your array went up after your last fire risk assessment, get in touch and we will tell you honestly whether a fresh assessment is worth commissioning.
