Free Electricity For 7 Years? The Fine Print Behind Reposit’s No Bill Promise

Have you got a 7 year itch for free electricity? ACT company Reposit is offering a “Reposit No Bill” deal where they’ll sell you a solar system and a home battery with a smart controller and guarantee you’ll receive no electricity bills for 7 years.

Reposit, which has been working on home battery optimisation for over 12 years, is currently offering this service in the ACT, Victoria, and Greater Sydney.

How much this deal makes sense depends on how badly you want 7 years of guaranteed no bills. But I’d say you’d have to be pretty desperate for them. With a decent-sized solar and battery system, your electricity bills are going to be very low anyway and may even be in credit. This means you could lose money by joining Reposit No Bill.

What You Get & Give

If you sign up for Reposit No Bill, you’ll receive:

• Rooftop solar
• A home battery and smart controller
• A guarantee your electricity bills will be $0 for 7 years
• A 10-year warranty on the solar and battery system

In return, you’ll have to provide Reposit with:

• Your bill history so Reposit can properly size your solar and battery system.
• A large amount of money upfront to pay for it.
• Control over the battery and the energy produced by the solar system.
• Freedom for Reposit to make money for their benefit by using your battery to support the grid.

This is enough to get you started on Reposit No Bill, but you won’t be able to keep it for the full 7 years if your electricity consumption rises too high above a baseline amount established by your bill history. If you exceed the baseline by over 20% for any three quarterly billing periods, Reposit can kick you off the No Bill guarantee.

Keeping the guarantee intact means being confident your electricity consumption won’t significantly increase for 6+ years. Buying an EV, going off gas, or having an extra person move in are all things that could cause you to exceed the +20% figure. Some good news is Reposit says they will inquire about potential changes to your electricity consumption before signing you up, so hopefully, you won’t be caught out.

Other points to keep in mind are…

• Your battery will receive wear and tear from being used by Reposit to support the grid for 7 years.
• While you’re protected for the 7-year period if electricity prices or solar feed-in tariffs fall, the flip side is you’ll receive no benefit if electricity prices fall or feed-in tariffs rise.
• While it’s marketed as providing security, there is a risk of Reposit going bust and disappearing before the 7-year No Bill period or the 10-year warranty period is over. Hopefully, this risk is only small.

Reposit No Bill’s System Size & Price

Reposit will look at your past electricity consumption and determine what size solar and battery system you’ll require. They say they will “right size” it. Because you’re paying for it you can ask for a larger system, but – for obvious reasons – they won’t want to install anything smaller than what they recommend.

If you go to the Reposit site, click on “Get an Instant Quote,” and answer some questions, then – after a delay – it will not give you a quote. What it will do is give an estimate of the system size and how much it will cost.

I tried it for Sydney, and when it asked how much I spent on electricity I clicked on “$2,000-$3,000/year”. As the average annual Sydney household bill is around $2,000, this represents an above-average consumption of around 4,800 to 8,000 kilowatt-hours per year. This is about what a 3 or 4-person household would use or a 2-person household with an electric car.  It then gave me this estimate:

• 6.6 kW solar system
• 14.4 kWh battery
• Total cost:  $18,990 – $22,000

That isn’t cheap. While I don’t recommend chasing the cheapest systems – you’re much better off paying for quality than getting a solar and battery system that may be poorly installed – you can get a reliable system that size from an installer who does quality work for less. One reason why is there’s a NSW Battery Rebate that lowers the cost of a 14.4kWh battery by around $2,000. If that battery becomes part of a Virtual Power Plant (VPP) there’s also an additional payment of around $300. You can estimate the rebate with our NSW Battery Rebate Calculator.¹

The Solar System Is Small

The solar system size in my Reposit No Bill estimate was only 6.6kW. This is smaller than what I usually recommend. Provided there’s room on the roof, most households should be installing 10kW or more. Especially if they have above-average electricity consumption. A larger solar system directly saves money by producing more energy and also improves the return from a home battery by helping to keep it charged during winter and periods of bad weather. Because getting a larger solar system is relatively inexpensive, it’s normally a good idea. But because Reposit can charge your battery from the grid if they need to, your home doesn’t need a large solar system for them to benefit from using your battery to provide services to the grid.

Unknown Hardware

Reposit doesn’t actually state on their estimate what solar panels, inverter, or battery you’ll get. But pictures on their site show SolaX inverters and SolaX Triple Power batteries, so that’s a good bet.  While the SolaX batteries pictured don’t come with a 14.4kWh capacity, the one below does.

A SolaX battery.  This one has 3.6kWh modules and 4 of them will give 14.4kWh.

Backup Capacity

No mention is made on the Reposit site about backup capability, so this is something you should definitely check if you’re interested. Trust me, you don’t want to pay a significant sum for a home battery but end up sitting in the dark during blackouts. If they say the battery provides backup, ask how much reserve power Reposit leaves in battery. If they don’t provide a reserve then it will be possible for Reposit to sell all the energy in the battery to the grid, leaving you with no backup power if the grid goes down.

What If I Already Have Solar?

If you already have solar and go for the No Bill deal, Reposit will remove your current solar and replace it with their own. This means it will probably only make sense if you were considering replacing it anyway. While it often makes financial sense to replace an old small system with a large new one, Reposit systems aren’t that large.

Your Electricity Bills Go To Reposit

After joining Reposit No Bill, you don’t have to change your electricity retailer or plan, but you must arrange with your retailer to have your bills sent to Reposit and they will pay them. No mention is made in their terms and conditions of what happens if your electricity bill is in credit thanks to receiving a solar feed-in tariff. But this is unlikely to happen, given the solar systems Reposit installs aren’t very large, the battery will reduce the feed-in tariff received by storing energy for the evening, and Reposit may use some energy to support the grid.

You can join any retailer or electricity plan you like but you can’t join a VPP or a plan that lets you buy and sell electricity at wholesale prices. This is because Reposit has control over your battery and you will be part of a Reposit VPP. But note this VPP doesn’t provide you with any benefit apart from the No Bill deal.

The ‘Fair-Use Cap’

Reposit says you can increase your electricity consumption by 20% and continue to receive the No Bill guarantee.

Reposit says “Use 20% More Power” but they actually mean “Use 20% More Electrical Energy”. Once again, a company that should know better has confused power and energy.

Reposit will look at your electricity consumption over the previous 12 months to determine a baseline consumption for each billing quarter of the year. You can increase your electricity consumption by up to 20% above this baseline and still pay nothing for electricity. This is called their “fair-use cap”. But if you exceed 20% for 3 or more quarters out of the 28 quarters in the 7 year period, Reposit can terminate your No Bill arrangement.

Three quarters is 9 months, so there’s a reasonable amount of leeway. But if you’re determined to stay on the No Bill plan I’d say you shouldn’t increase your electricity consumption by more than 15% to be safe. Buying an EV, switching from gas to electric hot water, or having an extra person move in could all put you over the fair-use cap.

Reposit says you’re responsible for not exceeding the cap, but they’ll let you know when your consumption reaches 80% of the cap limit.

Reposit Controls Your Battery

As part of the deal, reposit is allowed to use your battery to provide services to the grid. This could be providing ancillary services that help keep the grid stable or buying and selling electricity at wholesale prices. While you will receive no benefit from this — apart from no electricity bills — you can suffer the drawbacks of:

• Extra wear and tear on your battery that can reduce its lifespan and capacity.
• Little or no stored electricity may be available when a blackout occurs because Reposit sold it.

Assuming the Reposit battery is of decent quality, the deterioration from extra wear and tear shouldn’t amount to much.  But it’s still something to keep in mind. Because Reposit provides a 10-year warranty, they have an incentive not to trash your battery before it ends. But they also don’t have a financial incentive to preserve the battery so it lasts beyond the end of its warranty.

Internet Requirements

Your internet connection may be used if Reposit can’t get a reliable 4G signal.  In this case, Reposit will use around 500MB of your internet data per month. For comparison, the novel Moby Dick takes up 1MB.  So, on average, Reposit will Moby Dick your internet every hour and a half for seven years.

Backing Out

You can get out of the No Bill arrangement by giving Reposit 30 days notice in writing. The solar system and battery remain yours. There are no fees or penalties involved with backing out.  You’ll just have to pay electricity bills — or perhaps receive electricity bill credits — as normal.

What Happens After 7 Years?

At the end of the 7 years No Bill period, one option is to simply start paying electricity bills normally. Because you have solar and a battery, these are likely to be low. You may even start receiving an electricity bill credit. If you do, feel free to kick yourself for using Reposit No Bill. Your solar system and battery will remain under warranty for 3 more years.

If you decide you want another 7 year No Bill period, then things get a bit weird. Reposit says you can have another 7 years, but you have to buy a new battery from them. Because they give a 10 year warranty, this means they’ll be replacing a battery that should still have years of life left in it. I can understand them thinking a 7 year old battery may not be reliable enough to last another 7 years, but this seems wasteful. On the bright side, batteries could cost a lot less in 7 years time, so replacing them may not be financially painful.

My Conclusion — Only For Those Desperate For No Bills

If a typical Sydney household installed a 6.6kW solar system and a battery with around 14kWh capacity, then — provided they have an appropriate plan — their electricity bills are likely to be in credit by a couple hundred dollars per year. They’re still likely to be in credit even if their electricity consumption is 50% above average. To become more confident of receiving an electricity bill credit, the household could simply install a larger solar system.

If the household wants to improve the return further, they also have the option of joining a VPP. In NSW there is a rebate of around $300 for doing so and VPP payments can also be received. These are usually low and may only come to around $100 a year, but it still helps. See our comparison table for VPPs for more detail on what options are available.

Thanks in part to NSW rebates, a solar and battery system of the same size as in the Reposit estimate I received can be installed in Sydney by a professional who does quality work for the same price or less than Reposit’s figure.

For these reasons, I don’t recommend using Reposit No Bill unless you are desperate to lock in no bills for 7 years.  While you’ll be protected from electricity price increases, you’ll also miss out on the potential to come out financially ahead. If you’re interested, you can check what Reposit offers for your situation. But I strongly recommend checking your other options for solar panel systems and battery storage, and making sure you won’t be making yourself worse off by signing on the dotted line.