Plug-in solar panels (no electrician needed) have just become legal in the UK and will go on sale soon. Helios estimates how much electricity a typical installation could generate at a given address and what that's worth against your tariff.

It uses UK government LIDAR data to reflect the actual skyline, so it knows whether there's a building or a hill blocking the sun.

Caveats: - Outside LIDAR coverage (most of Scotland and Wales) it falls back to a synthetic horizon (less accurate). - Trees and recent developments (post-2022 or so) may not be in the data, and some address placements could be off (geocoding via OSM).

Feedback on the shading model especially welcome.

Nice. I'm working on a project called homestocompare to help people house-hunting in the UK.

Would be nice to add this as an extra data point when comparing. Are you open to collaborating at all?

Really cool stuff. Nitpick: it failed to grab an OSM ID for my house and fell back to postcode centroid, but then still reported LIDAR-derived shading at quite high precision.

I'm wondering if it should fall back to a more general shading approach when no OSM building footprint is available, to avoid false precision? My street has a gap in the houses on the other side from mine, so picking the right location matters for the calculation.

You could also try Inspire Index polygons instead of OSM? These correspond to actual lease/freehold boundaries.

Huh, TIL about the National LIDAR Programme: https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/f0db0249-f17b-4036-9e65-3091...

Very interesting stuff and quite a large undertaking! I'm often impressed by the quality of the UK's open data.

This is really nice! Would be great if it could handle regular rooftop solar calculations too.