Carefully trickle-charging your EV with surplus solar instead of buying electricity from the grid sounds like the perfect way to charge. But there’s an uncomfortable truth: slow charging can waste considerably more energy than charging at higher power with a home charger.
Spoiler alert: that doesn’t mean you should stop charging from solar. Cheap electricity still trumps charging efficiency when it comes to your wallet. [Continue reading…]
Last week I was in Officeworks waiting for some printing. Next to me, a woman was buying a laptop, and the Officeworks bloke helping her knew his stuff. Processors, RAM, screen brightness: all of it correct. Then he asked whether she’d considered a Mac, which opened a second long conversation about MacBooks, and by the end of it, she looked more confused than when she started.
He left her to think it over. I couldn’t help myself. [Continue reading…]
Australia’s data centre boom is going to need an extraordinary amount of electricity. Without the right rules, households and small businesses could end up sharing the bill.
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Everyone buying solar wants lower bills, but adding expensive batteries should be more about a reliable supply than straight-up bean-counting. The solar industry has, for a long time, glossed over a pretty basic point in battery-backed systems, so strap in while we explain the difference between series and parallel-connected supplies, and why it matters.
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Most of us want to believe the best in people. If your solar installer says they’re waiting on stock, you’ll probably accept it. If they ask for a few more weeks, you’ll give them a few more weeks. But when does patience stop being reasonable? That’s the question NSW homeowner Mark Barnes eventually found himself […]
[Continue reading…]
A fortnight ago, 7.30 aired an investigation into Solar Power Nation, a retailer the ABC reports is under investigation by authorities in Queensland, NSW and South Australia after hundreds of complaints. One customer, Amin Khorram, paid $13,000 for a battery system. Only one of the two inverters was installed, so he got 5 kW of […]
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From 1 September, NSW businesses are able to cut the upfront cost of a new battery by around 20–40%, with the biggest discounts available when new solar is installed alongside it. The battery incentives aren’t new, but with today’s launch, the NSW Government has now put some numbers around the savings, and confirmed they can be […]
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On 1 July 2026, it became much cheaper to permanently disconnect from gas in New South Wales (NSW) and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). Like many regulatory changes, this news was tucked away in a PDF that most people never read.
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In the colder months of the year, your heat pump hot water system may need adjusting. Heat pump hot water systems are highly efficient because they don’t generate heat in the same way as traditional electric hot water systems. Instead, they draw heat from the surrounding air and transfer it into the water.
[Continue reading…]
Western Australia’s government-owned Synergy has an unusual position in the electricity market: it owns some of the state’s biggest batteries, as well as generators selling electricity into the same market. New analysis has found its batteries sometimes charging at surprisingly high wholesale prices in the middle of the night, helping push those prices even higher. […]
[Continue reading…]
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