Switch Together or a local installer: how to choose

What Switch Together is, in plain terms

Switch Together is run by iChoosr Ltd, a company that organises group-buying auctions for councils across the country, under the trading name Switch Together (it operated for years as Solar Together, and some council pages still use that name). Dorset, Essex, Norwich and other authorities have run a round of it. If you're searching "solar together dorset," you're most likely looking for Solar Together Dorset, the council's own round with iChoosr: its page confirms personal recommendations were emailed from 1 October, with installations planned by the end of June 2026. You register for a round through switchtogether.co.uk.

Nothing about the scheme is dishonest or a trick. It's a genuine attempt by local authorities to get residents a vetted installer and a fair price without each household having to shop around alone. It isn't the only honest route, and it isn't automatically the cheapest one for your specific roof.

How the registration window and auction work

You register during an open window, which a council announces and which it sets the length of itself. Registration asks for basic details: your postcode, roof type, and rough energy use. It's free and commits you to nothing.

Once the window closes, participating installers submit competing bids in a reverse auction: they're bidding for the right to install systems across everyone who registered in that round, not for your job alone. The installer whose bid wins supplies every household in that round with a personalised offer, based on the roof details you gave and a follow-up survey.

You then get a set period, commonly around five weeks, to decide whether to accept. There's no penalty for declining, and you can register again in a future round if you change your mind.

What the offer includes

The winning installer designs a system for your roof after a proper survey, not just from your online form answers. The published scheme material describes installers as vetted for "experience, accreditations, customer service, safety standards, and financial stability," and the installation itself comes with warranties and aftercare from that installer, exactly as it would from any installer you found yourself.

Battery storage is usually offered alongside solar, and some rounds include heat pumps or an energy-switching tariff. What you don't get is a choice of installer: the auction's whole mechanism depends on one winner per round, so you can't pick a different firm and keep the group-buying price.

Is Switch Together worth it?

For a straightforward roof in a council area currently running a round, it can be a sensible way to get a vetted installer without doing the legwork of finding one yourself. The auction mechanism exists precisely so you benefit from installers competing for volume rather than for your individual job, and that's a real, structural reason the pricing can be competitive.

The trade-off is timing and flexibility. You're on the council's registration calendar, not your own, and your roof gets one offer rather than several to compare line by line. If your roof is unusual (a steep pitch, a listed building, limited south-facing space) a single standardised offer is less useful than a surveyor who's looked at it in person and can talk through the options with you.

Switch Together compared with going direct to a local installer

Questions worth asking on either route

• Is the price fixed in writing, or just an estimate that can move after survey?
• What's physically included: panels, inverter, any battery, scaffolding, bird protection, the monitoring setup, and the paperwork for grid connection and export payments?
• Has anyone actually been to the property, or is the offer based on photos and a form?
• What's the realistic timescale from signing to switch-on?
• What warranty covers the workmanship specifically, separate from the panel and inverter manufacturer warranties?
• Who do you call if something needs attention two years after installation?

A written answer to every one of those, before you sign anything, matters more than which route you took to get the quote.

Where Pro-Fit fits into this

We want to be straightforward about this: Pro-Fit is not part of Switch Together. We're Flexi-Orb certified and an HIES member for solar and battery work, and every Pro-Fit solar install includes help registering for export payments, so you're not left to sort that out alone. If a particular certification matters to you, for example because a scheme asks for it by name, ask us for the certificate and check it on the scheme's own register before you choose. That goes for any installer.

What we offer instead is published guide pricing you can see on our pricing page before you even book a survey, a free survey on your actual roof, and a price fixed in writing afterwards rather than an estimate that can shift. Our how it works page sets out the same four stages as any proper installation: survey, written quote, installation, handover with the app and paperwork done. There's no auction and no registration window. You can ask for a quote whenever your roof needs one.

We're not going to tell you Switch Together is a bad idea, because for plenty of households it isn't. We'd just rather you knew exactly what each route gives you before you commit to either.