Where can you install a home battery? The rules are written down now.

Home battery storage rules: what changed in 2026

On 15 April 2026 the IET and BSI published Amendment 4 to BS 7671, the wiring regulations every UK electrician works to. Its headline change for our trade is a brand-new chapter — Chapter 57, stationary secondary batteries — covering home battery storage for the first time. The IET says it puts "strong emphasis on safety-critical matters such as appropriate battery location, ventilation, and fire-risk mitigation". The previous edition of the regulations is withdrawn on 15 October 2026, after which new installations are designed to the new one.

What it means for you

Are home batteries banned in lofts?

You will find a lot of pages online saying Amendment 4 has banned batteries in lofts. Read the regulation itself and that isn't quite what happened. For homes, the IET's own write-up points to Regulation 570.6.7.203, and what it says is that batteries in dwellings must be installed in accordance with PAS 63100 — a separate fire-safety specification BSI published on 20 March 2024, whose full title is "Protection against fire of battery energy storage systems for use in dwellings".

So the wiring regulations didn't write a list of banned rooms. They pointed at the document that deals with where a battery goes, and made it the reference for every home installation. BSI's own summary of PAS 63100 says it covers "installation location in respect of safety and external influences that affect fire safety" — the detail sits inside a standard you have to pay for, which is precisely why it is your installer's job and not your homework. If you want the honest version of this: ask whoever quotes you which document they are siting your battery to, and see whether they can name it.

Where can you install a home battery in a house?

For most homeowners this changes nothing you have to do. It changes what a good installation looks like from the inside. The photo at the top of this page is a real Romford install of ours — a Fox ESS battery bank and hybrid inverter, mounted in a dedicated space with the cable runs trunked and every isolator labelled. On a Leighton Buzzard job the storage is a Sigenergy stack on a solid wall. Neither is in a bedroom, neither is buried in insulation, and both were put where they are because siting a battery is a design decision made before anyone turns up with a drill — not somewhere convenient found on the day.

The quote that doesn't say where your battery goes

The part we'd genuinely warn you about is the quote that doesn't say where the battery is going. "Battery included" with no location on the drawing is the cheapest kind of quote to write and the most expensive kind to fix, because moving a fitted battery means a second visit, second cable run and second set of certificates. If you are in Romford or anywhere else we cover and you're comparing quotes, that single line is worth more than the discount on the front page. What a system with storage costs is set out in our pricing guide, and the three battery platforms we fit are compared in our battery guide.

One honest caveat. We have quoted only what the IET and BSI publish themselves. The specific room-by-room rules people are repeating online come from inside PAS 63100, which is a paid document — so we have not restated them here, and we would treat any blog that does with some caution.

Published: 24 August 2026.