Solar Marketing in Wexford: What Works Going Into 2027
Irish homeowners have never bought more solar panels. So why does it feel harder than ever to sell them?
Ask a solar installer in Wexford how business is going, and you will often get two answers at once. Demand is strong. Phones still ring. And yet the cost of winning each customer keeps creeping up, half the leads seem to go nowhere, and nobody can say for sure which ad actually paid for last month's van full of panels.
That is the paradox of the Irish solar market heading into the end of 2026 and the start of 2027. The boom is real. But the easy part of the boom is over. The installers who grow from here will not be the ones who shout loudest online. They will be the ones who know exactly where every euro goes, and who pick up the phone first.
A record year, and a busier one coming
The numbers are hard to argue with. In 2025, 34,088 Irish households installed solar panels with SEAI grant support, up from 29,151 the year before. That was the best year on record, and 21 counties beat their own 2024 totals (Farmers Journal).
2026 kept going. SEAI data from the first quarter showed another rise, and about half of all new installations now come with a battery (The Irish Times). By the end of May, Ireland had 2.7 GW of solar connected to the grid, and more than 190,000 homes and businesses were making their own electricity (Solar Ireland, Scale of Solar 2026).
Then came October. From 6 October 2026, the rules shifted in installers' favour (Electrical Wholesaler):
More homes qualify. The €1,800 solar PV grant is now open to homes built and occupied before 2025, not just before 2021.
Batteries get their own grant. A new €600 grant for home batteries sits on top of the panel grant.
Businesses and farms get a bigger push. The Non-Domestic Microgen Grant pays an effective 45% rate on applications made between 7 October 2026 and 6 July 2027.
There is a catch, and it matters for planning. The government has said the household grant is meant to shrink by up to €300 a year and end in 2029 (Southern Star). That gives homeowners a real reason to act now. It also means the market will feel very different in two or three years.
Why Wexford is not Dublin
Most advice about solar marketing in Ireland is written with Dublin in mind. Wexford plays a different game.
The sun is on your side. Wexford is often called the sunniest county in Ireland. One installer database puts its average solar yield at 965 kWh per kWp, among the highest in the country (Solar Info). That is a real selling point, and most local ads never use it.
Demand is proven, but not used up. Wexford was one of only five counties where more than 1,000 households took the SEAI solar grant in 2025, alongside Clare, Kerry, Waterford and Mayo (Farmers Journal). Yet Enniscorthy-based Pinergy has pointed out that sunny counties like Wexford still show uneven uptake per head, and called it untapped potential (South East Radio).
The auction is less crowded. One directory counts 139 installers serving Dublin. Cork has 58, and no other county reaches 50 (Solar Info, State of Solar 2025). Fewer bidders usually means cheaper clicks. Our own Google Ads forecasts put estimated bids for solar searches in Wexford roughly 10–15% below Dublin. It does not mean clicks are cheap. National brands, energy suppliers and lead-selling websites bid on Wexford searches too.
The buyer is different. Think detached houses with big roofs, farms with sheds, and small businesses on the edge of town. A farmer in Gorey weighing a 45% business grant asks very different questions from a semi-d owner in Swords. The same ad will not work for both.
Word of mouth still matters, but it moved online. In a county where people know each other, a neighbour's recommendation is gold. Today that recommendation usually shows up as a Google review, a Facebook comment, or a photo in a local group.
Where the money leaks
Talk to enough installers and the same four complaints come up.
1. Clicks are expensive. Solar is one of the pricier service niches on Google. An Irish agency puts typical solar clicks at €3 to €10, sometimes more (Social Gravity). Across the water, UK installers see £3 to £9 a click and often £100 to £250 per lead from search (Solar Weekly). Ireland is a different market, but the logic is the same: if a landing page converts 3% of visitors, you pay for about 33 clicks before one person fills in a form.
2. Bought leads are rarely yours alone. Quote-comparison sites spend heavily on Google, then sell the same enquiry to three to five installers (Visionary Marketing). The homeowner gets four calls in an hour. The cheapest quote often wins. Your cost per lead looks fine on the invoice, but your cost per signed job does not.
3. The phone rings too late. People who work with Irish installers say many companies call new leads back three to five days after they come in (LinkedIn, solar lead-gen specialist). That is not proven market data, but anyone who has bought solar will recognise it. By day three, the homeowner has already had a survey booked with someone else.
4. Nobody knows what actually worked. This is the quiet one, and the most expensive. A typical setup counts form fills in Google Ads, likes on Facebook, and signed contracts in a spreadsheet. Those three never talk to each other. So the business owner sees "80 leads this month" and has no idea which keyword, which ad, or which county brought the five jobs that paid the bills. Budget then gets cut in the wrong place.
Put those four together and you get the real problem. It is not that solar marketing does not work. It is that most installers cannot see where it works, and lose the customers it brings before they ever talk to them.
Winter is when summer gets sold
It is tempting to ease off ads when the days get short. That is usually a mistake.
Solar in Ireland has a long runway. A homeowner has to get an SEAI letter of offer before any work starts, and then has eight months to finish the job (SEAI guidance via Solar Boss). People who start thinking in November want their panels up by spring, when the long days begin. Early 2026 showed how strong that winter pipeline can be: one Irish quote site reports more than 10,000 grant applications in the first quarter, up about 65% on the same months in 2025 (Solar Quotes Ireland).
Here is how the next nine months look for a Wexford installer:
Period | What buyers are doing | What it means for marketing |
Oct–Dec 2026 | Reading about the new €600 battery grant and wider eligibility. Comparing quotes before the new year. | Lead with the October changes. Talk to people with older solar who now want a battery. Start business and farm campaigns for the 45% window. |
Jan–Mar 2027 | Bills arrive after the darkest months. Grant applications pick up fast. | Your biggest lead window. Budgets and follow-up speed should be at their highest here. |
Apr–Jun 2027 | Panels go on roofs. Neighbours notice. | Collect reviews and photos from every finished job. Push the business grant before it closes on 6 July 2027. |
One more thing to watch: Budget 2027 and any news on the household grant. If a cut for 2028 is confirmed, expect a rush late in 2027, just as happened before earlier cuts.
What actually works
No single channel fixes this. What works is a chain, and it is only as strong as its weakest link.
Google Search catches people who are ready. Someone typing "solar panels Wexford" or "solar battery grant" already wants a quote. The win comes from precision: county and town names, exact match on buying words, and negative keywords that keep out students and DIY tinkerers. Bidding on broad national terms against quote sites with deep pockets is usually a losing fight.
Send them to a page made for them. Not your homepage. A page that says Wexford, shows the grant maths, has real photos of local roofs, and asks for a few details in one short form. Every extra step on that page costs leads.
Facebook and Instagram create demand. Most homeowners scroll past solar for months before they act. Short videos of real installs, a neighbour talking about her bill, or a simple "here's what €1,800 plus €600 covers" post keep you in mind until they are ready. Lead forms on Meta are cheap, but they need fast follow-up, or they go cold.
Your Google Business Profile is your shop window. For "near me" searches, reviews and photos often matter more than the ad. In a county like Wexford, a steady flow of fresh, detailed reviews can be the cheapest marketing an installer has.
Analytics ties it all together. This is where most installers fall down. Good tracking follows a lead from the first click to the signed contract. It tells you that one keyword in Gorey brought three paid jobs while another in Wexford town brought twenty tyre-kickers. It also feeds that knowledge back to Google and Meta, so the ad systems learn to find more buyers, not more form fillers.
And then the sales team. None of the above matters if the lead waits three days. An automatic text in the first minute, a call within the hour, and a clear next step (a survey date, not "we'll be in touch") do more for cost per job than any bidding trick. Marketing and sales are one funnel. If they are run as two separate worlds, the money leaks in the gap.
A quick check before 2027
If you run a solar business in Wexford or the south-east, ask yourself these questions before the January rush:
Do I know my cost per signed job, not just my cost per lead?
Can I see which keyword, ad or campaign each paying customer came from?
Does every new lead get a reply within five minutes, even at the weekend?
Do my ads send people to a local landing page, not my homepage?
Am I talking about the new €600 battery grant and the wider home eligibility?
Do I have a separate offer for farms and businesses before the 45% grant window closes on 6 July 2027?
Am I asking every happy customer for a Google review with photos?
Do my sales team and my marketing look at the same numbers each week?
If you ticked fewer than half, you are not alone. Most installers are in the same spot. The good news is that each of these is fixable, and the fixes tend to pay for themselves faster than a bigger ad budget.
At Power-Up, we focus on exactly this gap: paid search, paid social and the analytics that connect them to real sales, for businesses in Co. Wexford and across the south-east. If you want a second pair of eyes on your current setup, get in touch.