Almost half the solar panels inspected at an £8 million Fife housing estate are broken, we can reveal.
Residents have said they have made off and on payments for the broken panels since Kingdom Housing finished building their “eco friendly” homes in 2016.
However, the housing association has said they stop charging residents for the panels when they discover a fault.
Mandy Cutt, 55, lives on the Guardbridge housing estate.
She said her panels stopped working between April 2019 and May 2022.
“This has been going on since at least 2019 and we are getting nowhere.”
“We just keep getting excuse after excuse,” she added.
Lisa Lynch, 40, has had similar problems.
“I was dead excited to live in an eco-friendly home,” she said.
“And we were told we would be saving money – what a load of rubbish.”
Residents with solar panels pay either £11 or £20 a month, depending on the size of solar panels.
Lisa said some of her neighbours were struggling with the extra payments.
“There are people sitting there in their Oodies [an oversized hooded jumper] because they can’t afford to put their heating on. It’s not fair.
“How dare Kingdom take that £11 and not even try to help the people that are struggling?”
Guardbridge housing estate cost £8m to build
Social landlord Kingdom Housing completed the Guardbridge development in March 2016. It cost more than £8 million to build.
Benny Maxfield, 72, is also angry at the long-running problem.
“How would you like me to take your bank details and take £11 from your account for seven years and you’ll never see any return from it?”
“[A staff member from Kingdom] came here at the end of November. He sat there apologising and promised to stop the payments – but it never happened.”
Kingdom Housing will repair solar panels as ‘as soon as possible’
A Kingdom Housing Association spokesperson admitted that they found problems with some solar panels last year.
“Following reports from a small number of tenants early in 2022 concerning issues with their solar panels, we brought in a specialist to check the panels, repair them where possible, and identify the reasons for any failures.”
“The investigation results were inconclusive,” he said.
The housing association then attempted to check all the panels in the scheme, accessing around two thirds of them.
“Of those we have been able to access, approximately half are working as expected.”
He said they still didn’t know why the panels failed, but had identified a “way forward”.
“We are now looking at completing repairs as soon as possible in the affected properties.
“We remain in regular contact with our tenants to reassure them that we will find a solution and, once we fully understand what has happened, we will look at providing compensation for any payments made for non-functioning systems,” he added.
Conversation