Helios
what plug-in solar could generate for any address in Britain
Details
- External ID
- 48334949
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Helios
- Website domain
- southlondonscientific.com
- Launched
- May 30, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 126
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9337641357027464
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Plug-in solar panels (no electrician needed) have just become legal in the UK and will go on sale soon. Helios estimates how much electricity a typical installation could generate at a given address and what that's worth against your tariff.It uses UK government LIDAR data to reflect the actual skyline, so it knows whether there's a building or a hill blocking the sun.Caveats: - Outside LIDAR coverage (most of Scotland and Wales) it falls back to a synthetic horizon (less accurate). - Trees and recent developments (post-2022 or so) may not be in the data, and some address placements could be off (geocoding via OSM).Feedback on the shading model especially welcome.
Enrichment
- Theme
- specialized calculators and estimation tools
- Vertical
- Energy & climate
- Function
- Analytics & BI
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- solar generation estimation for uk addresses
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The frontend wizard and PVGIS API integration are straightforward, but parsing multi-gigabyte open UK LIDAR point cloud datasets and performing 3D ray-tracing against surrounding buildings requires specialized geospatial engineering.
What it would actually take: The system requires a backend geospatial pipeline handling UK Environment Agency digital surface models (DSM/DTM raster/point clouds). It must run 3D ray-casting or viewshed calculations from user coordinates and building heights to generate a 360-degree horizon obstruction profile, which is then fed into the EU PVGIS solar radiation API.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Helioscope by Aurora Solar, Commercial solar assessment tools
Concerns raised: High upfront cost with 7-10 year payback period, Pricing 2x higher than continental Europe (Germany), Limited LIDAR coverage (most of Scotland and Wales excluded), Installation costs unclear and hard to find, UK generally more expensive than neighboring countries
Feature requests: Precise location picker with house number support, Adjustable panel height and placement settings (ground-level garden panels), Accurate height measurement beyond 1.5m floor assumption
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 64 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #3 of 65 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 171 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Brightleaf Energy · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Solar Systems Brisbane · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a analytics & bi tool for Legal yet.