GuidanceFire safety, September 2026
Rooftop solar panels and fire risk on school buildings
A rooftop array is an electrical installation that cannot be switched off in daylight, sitting above occupied classrooms.
On 24 June 2026 a member of staff at Sidegate Lane Primary School in Ipswich reported a smell of smoke. The building was evacuated, around 650 pupils and 100 staff got out, and Suffolk Fire and Rescue Service later confirmed the cause was a solar panel on the roof. The panels dated from 2012.
It was the third fire at a Suffolk primary school in under a year. The county council isolated the arrays at around 80 schools, most installed between 2011 and 2016, while it reviewed them.
Keeping it in proportion
Set against a very large installed base, the chance of any one array catching fire is small, and this is not an argument against solar. What makes it worth ten minutes is the consequence. A fire in the roof above classrooms takes a building out of use for months, and it starts in the part of the school nobody sees.
Why arrays fail
Usually at the connections rather than in the panel: poorly crimped or mismatched connectors, water ingress, cable insulation degraded by sunlight or chafed on an edge, and a direct current arc that will not put itself out. Shading and debris, ageing inverters and rodent damage all add to it.
Panels also generate whenever there is daylight, so they cannot be made dead by pulling the main switch. Crews need to know an array is there before they arrive rather than when they reach the roof.
The first question is who owns it
Many school arrays sit under a roof lease or a power purchase agreement, so the maintenance duty may rest with the operator. That works perfectly well, as long as somebody can point to the agreement and the last inspection report.
Six questions to ask
- Do we have an array, and who owns and maintains it in writing.
- When was it last inspected, and can we see the report.
- Is it covered by the fire risk assessment and the electrical inspection.
- Are the isolators labelled, and does a plan show the array and inverter.
- Has anyone carried out a thermographic survey of the connections.
- Is the roof clear of debris, and has the inverter room become a store.
How we help
We bring the array, the isolators and the inverter room into the fire risk assessment, and set out what to ask the maintainer for.
General guidance only. It does not replace the fire risk assessment, water hygiene risk assessment or specific advice for a particular building.
