Fire safety and insurance for care home solar

The governing instrument is the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. It places duties on the ‘responsible person’ — in practice the registered provider or the person with control of the premises — to make a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment and to keep it under review. Adding a rooftop array, DC cabling through the building and, if specified, a battery, is a material alteration to the premises. The review is not optional and it is not a formality: it is the document an enforcing authority will ask for.

Now the part that gets mis-stated in almost every proposal. PAS 63100:2024 — the BSI specification on protection against fire of battery energy storage systems — is scoped to dwellings. A CQC-registered care home is not a dwelling; it is regulated premises with a responsible person under the RRO. Citing PAS 63100 as the governing standard for a care home battery is a category error, and it matters because it signals the supplier has reached for a domestic template rather than engineering for your building. The applicable framework is BS 7671:2018+A2:2022 for the electrical installation, BS EN IEC 62619 for industrial lithium cells and batteries, the manufacturer’s installation requirements, and the RRO risk assessment that ties them to your premises.

None of this makes a battery unsuitable. It makes the siting decision consequential, which is a different thing.

Claims table — standards and duties cited on this page

This is the point that separates a care home from a warehouse with the same roof area. Most care homes do not evacuate simultaneously. They use progressive horizontal evacuation: residents are moved laterally through fire-resisting construction into an adjoining compartment on the same floor, because moving a large number of frail or immobile people down a staircase quickly is not achievable. Many residents cannot self-evacuate at all, and personal emergency evacuation plans exist precisely because the default assumption of a self-rescuing occupant does not hold.

Three design consequences follow, and a competent designer raises all three unprompted:

• Do not site plant so that it compromises a compartment. Inverters and any battery should not sit in, or open onto, a protected escape route or a compartment that residents are expected to be moved into. Running DC cable through a compartment wall without correctly reinstating the fire-stopping is one of the most common defects found afterwards.
• Integrate detection rather than bolt it on. Where a battery is installed internally, detection in that room needs to report to the building’s existing BS 5839-1 system so staff see it on the panel they actually monitor, not on a separate unit nobody looks at.
• Make isolation obvious to a firefighter. Clear, durable labelling of the DC isolation point, an accessible AC isolator, and a roof plan showing array extent. A fire and rescue service arriving at a residential care building at night should not have to work out where the DC side switches off.

Siting the battery externally, or in a dedicated enclosure with its own fire separation and no opening into an escape route, removes most of this argument in one decision. On the majority of schemes it is also cheaper than retrofitting compartmentation to make an internal plant room acceptable.

If a battery is part of the scheme, the cell chemistry is a safety decision rather than a commercial preference. Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) has a markedly higher thermal runaway onset temperature and a less energetic failure mode than the nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) chemistry common in vehicle and some domestic products. For a building full of people who cannot leave quickly, that margin is the whole argument.

Specify it explicitly. A specification that says ‘lithium battery’ without naming the chemistry lets the supplier substitute at order stage, and chemistry is not a detail you want decided by whatever was in stock. Ask for the cell-level certification to BS EN IEC 62619 and the manufacturer’s installation manual, and check that the proposed siting actually complies with the clearances in it — manufacturers specify minimum separation distances that a tight plant room frequently cannot meet.

Note also that a battery is not compulsory. Solar without storage carries a materially simpler fire-safety case, and on schemes with a strong daytime load it may deliver most of the benefit anyway. If storage is being pushed hard by a supplier on a site with high daytime self-consumption, ask what it adds beyond what the array already captures. Our battery storage page sets out when it genuinely earns its place.

An installation is a change to the risk, and the time to tell your insurer is before works begin, in writing. Notifying afterwards — or not at all — is the single most common way cover becomes disputed, and the dispute arrives at the worst possible moment.

Send them, as a package: the system size and layout, the cell chemistry and siting if there is a battery, the roof construction and any changes to it, the installer’s certification and competence evidence, the electrical certification under BS 7671, and the reviewed fire risk assessment. Underwriters in this sector ask for the same things repeatedly, and supplying them unprompted shortens the process considerably.

Expect questions in three areas. Roof construction: insurers treat combustible insulation and certain panel systems very differently from a concrete or mineral-wool deck, and a small number will decline a rooftop array on specific constructions. Battery siting: external is straightforward; internal invites conditions. Maintenance regime: an unmaintained array is a deteriorating electrical asset, so expect a periodic inspection requirement. If a broker tells you notification is unnecessary, get that in writing — they will not give it to you.

Use this as a checklist when comparing quotations. A proposal for a care home should contain all of it; most contain about half.

• A statement that the fire risk assessment will require review, and whose job that is
• Battery chemistry named as LFP, with cell certification to BS EN IEC 62619
• A siting drawing showing the plant location relative to compartment lines and escape routes
• Fire-stopping detail for every cable penetration of a fire-resisting element
• Detection interfaced to the existing BS 5839-1 panel where plant is internal
• Labelled DC and AC isolation, with a roof plan for the fire and rescue service
• An insurer notification pack, and a named point of contact to send it to
• A maintenance and periodic inspection schedule, priced

If a supplier cannot produce the siting drawing against compartment lines, they have not engineered the job for a care setting. That single document is the most reliable filter available to you, and it costs nothing to ask for. When you are ready to compare designs, our installation process page explains what happens at each stage.