A family has told of the moment they watched as their newbuild home went up in flames in a suspected solar panel fire, just weeks after a similar fire. Homes on the estate have now been told to switch off their panels. The Mail has the story.
Tammi Atherton, 54, had been parked up in the lounge with Wimbledon on the telly and was about to take a shower upstairs on July 4th when her fire alarm went off.
She had been with her son Ben, 21, and quickly checked the house in Weston-Super-Mare for signs of smoke but couldn’t find anything awry.
Moments later, a neighbour started banging on the door, telling them to get out because their roof was ablaze.
Without shoes on their feet, the mother and son rushed outside with their beloved dog Oakley at around 12.45pm to see their roof engulfed in flames.
Firefighters arrived within minutes, but the blaze raged on for four hours, with eight fire crews and four police cars called to the scene.
Daughter Molly was in the garden of her Bristol home with her father when her brother called.
She told the Daily Mail: “I was at home with my partner and my dad had popped round. We were all sat in the garden and I got a phone call off my brother who told me the house was on fire.
The 24 year-old, along with her partner and father, drove more than an hour to the house which was burning when they arrived.
Video footage captured of the blaze shows neighbours gathered outside the property watching the flames tearing through the roof after it collapsed.
Pictures shared of the fire show plumes of thick grey smoke billowing down the street lined with newbuild properties.
Molly recalled finding her brother stood outside watching everything the family owned get destroyed by the fire.
“We came round the corner and saw my brother just watching his house and belongings go up in flames,” she said.
“It was devastating. You never think it’s going to be you, then you get a phone call and it’s your own family member telling you there’s a fire.”
She said the fire service suspected that the solar panels fitted on the roof caused the blaze to erupt.
The newbuild was located on an estate built two years ago by housing association, Curo Group, who Molly criticised for their response to the incident.
She said: “Most of their properties have solar panels and Curo were not very helpful. They essentially said because my mum owns the house they can’t help.”
Curo Group has now apologised to Tammi and confirmed that two investigations into the fire have been launched.
The company has also told every Curo-built household on the estate to turn off their solar panels as a precaution.
Unfortunately, family have not been allowed to return to the home which has been declared structurally unsafe. …
This is not the first suspected solar panel fire to destroy a newbuild property during the summer heatwave.
A set of solar panels on a £600,000 newbuild home exploded while a family was still inside in May.
Worth reading in full.
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The Tall buildings fire safety conference had a man promoting this a few years ago. P50 PVStop Solar Panel Block Out Extinguisher His point was that the panels keep operating as long as the sun is on them, cannot be switched off but can be covered with something and that will stop the reaction. Switching off the feed from the panel to the ground doesn’t stop the fire. Years ago firemen in Germany were getting electrocuted trying to put out solar panel fires on roofs. Don’t know what the current situation is.
Hard as I try, I can’t find even a scintilla of sympathy. Not least because my money is being taken from me to subsidise this.
This, exactly this.
I think you’re being a little harsh. Are potential buyers going to turn their backs on an entire development because every home comes with solar panels pre-installed by the developer? There are so many things to consider when buying a property (facilities, location, price etc.) that I’m sure the existence of solar panels on the roof would be seen as a minor thing.
I doubt it’s the panels catching fire, solar panels are basically just a sheet of glass with some silicon inside. Solar farms have significantly more panels than are on houses, and they don’t seem to catch fire.
It’ll be because of poor installation,
Undersized cabling,
Lack of protection for cables as they go through the roof,
And I suspect they’re putting the inverters and batteries in the loft where they can’t get sufficient cooling. It’s all because they’re doing it on the cheap,
Should be a matter for building regs
It probably is already.
Concentration of energy into a known fire risk (lithium-ion battery) and application of heat which leads to very high temperatures in the roof space and nearly all chemical reactions accelerate with heat.
This is a significant problem and won’t be going away any time soon. The fire alarm system probably should have an additional input from sensors in the roof space, perhaps this one did which itself tells you something about the risk.
Far too sensible and technically grounded. The real reason this happens is because the sunshine made the roof space too hot. And that’s your fault (and mine): because we don’t have solar panels – because we take too many showers/use AC – because we went on holiday this year.
Far from the first event like this.
Bristol hospital, all those school trusts turning off their panels, my own work place.
It’s at the point where the DS could publish a known list, especially of the public buildings affected.
It would be interesting to know the results of fire investigations as one of the recent ones where the roof exploded was more likely an inverter or battery failure. Also who and where this stuff was made.
And where was the equipment installed, and how the connnecting cabling that goes with it.
Slightly off topic, but I think we should all start posting the Flightradar24 (or similar) details of all the planes we see streaming out clear Chemtrails across our skies.
If we start gathering the data, naming and shaming the flights involved, asking awkward questions of airlines, submitting FOI requests, maybe we could get this awful practice stopped.
“Slightly off-topic”? More like totally irrelevant. Anyway…
Perhaps you would mind telling us how to differentiate between a “chemtrail” and a perfectly natural “contrail”?
The ones that don’t dissipate, but just spread in a horrible sprawling wispy mess! Spoil a perfectly pleasant blue sky, and spread who knows what unpleasant chemicals. We did not get trails like this 40 years ago, nor did we get the vague wispy clouds we frequently see now.
Surprised you’ve never noticed them!
Entirely dependent on wind and temperature conditions up in the stratosphere, they are formed from ice crystals from the residual water and combustion products in jet fuel.
Do you really think that airlines are prepared to carry extra mass and pay extra for chemicals for which the aircraft have no tanks to carry them in?
No, neither do I.
You mean cirrus clouds?
Vapour trails.
Also the fire at the school in Okehampton back in February. The solar installation was suspected at the time, but it all seems to have gone quiet now.
Nothing to see here, move along, sparks from the cigarettes being smoked behind the bike sheds.