You may have read Finn’s original ‘7-mistakes’ article, followed by ex WA-installer Kim’s take and SA Installer Chris’s version. Now here are the biggest mistakes I’ve seen people make buying solar during my years on and off the roofs of South Australia:
Mistake #1) Not Asking This Question
The only thing shonky installers hate more than a Clean Energy Regulator enforcable undertaking is a customer who has some notes. With knowledge comes power, and if a shonky installer realises that you have questions that need answers, they’ll have to behave. In fact, if you really want to scare them, refer to yourself as a “retired engineer”.
One of the BEST questions to ask is :
“Have you ever processed a warranty claim?”
- Was it timely?
- Was the manufacturer support good?
- Did they pay an appropriate amount for time, travel and labour to complete a product changeover?
How an installer answers this question will quickly reveal their attitude to warranty service and long-term customer support. You are looking for someone who has a proven record of looking after their customer when things go wrong.
A particularly talented salesperson could always lie of course. So always, always, always independently verify information, whenever possible. There are numerous resources available to help you verify what solar salesmen tell you, such as the big fat SolarQuotes search box on this page and the Clean Energy Council (bearing in mind that the “approved solar retailer” endorsement is considered a pay-for-play industry joke).
The Whirlpool forums are also one of my favourite sources of such information, but if Google can’t help you, I will. Just shoot me an email here with the subject ‘Ask Anthony’.
Mistake #2) Putting Off Buying Solar Because… ummm…
I’ve heard so many people give (non)reasons for not buying a solar power system:
- technology
- incentive
- price
- pessimism
Once upon a time, it was because Origin Energy was working on these new sliver cells and they were going to be a game changer. Maybe the exchange rate was moving. New panels will be better. And the perennial suspicion about State/Federal governments will/won’t soon offer more/less money and the Lib/Lab government would soon impose penalties/taxes.
Even this week I’ve seen people asserting:
- “solar is a scam”
- “there’s no feed-in tariff”
- “they will me rip me off”
Which is depressing to hear in a forum of electricians. Apparently, fossil-fueled Stockholm syndrome isn’t just a disease of coal miners.
The fact is every day solar energy pours onto your roof. Harnessing it is simple, and it will make a difference from day one, no matter what season.
It’s like planting a tree – there have been good seasons and great ones, but the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago.
Mistake #3) Buying Solely On Price
Whether it’s reassuringly expensive or incredibly cheap, offered by door knockers or dissipated sports stars, don’t sign on the first dotted line you can find. You’ll likely get exactly the same chintzy hardware installed by carefree subcontractors with no documentation or support.
It pains me that so many Australians are taken in by these shonks and that with some 600,000 orphaned systems, so many have “gone bust” and then phoenixed their way out of warranty obligations.
When NSW Fair Trading found one prominent operator doing the wrong thing, they were threatened with a loss of contracting licence. This mob had the chutzpah to say they all their customers would lose warranty support if they could no longer install. It was audacious, but I guess they were fighting for all those customers who could soon give them a one-star review.
Mistake #4) Misunderstanding Solar Energy Savings
Confusing the incentive of low bills.
The main benefit of solar power is never printed on your bill. In fact, it’s almost invisible (unless you have monitoring) but bear with me while I explain.
For a hundred years the electricity industry has been pretty feudal. The kings generated the power, the knights distributed it and we peasants had no choice but to accept our lot and pay. Through the nose usually.
Happily, the revolution is upon us. We’ve erected a guillotine in the public square and there’s a sharpened solar panel slicing the heads off electricity bills every day. Vive la révolution
Democracy has come to electricity because there is now some choice of where your energy comes from. At every sunrise, you have the power to be an intelligent prosumer instead of a passive consumer.
The real incentive solar power offers you is to take an interest, to change your behaviour and save money simply by being more efficient. Monitoring apps really help here.
With electricity generated on your roof, powering your stuff, it literally gives you the power, and your retailer never knew it happened so they can’t put it on the bill. That’s why it’s very real to you, but as far as the retailer is concerned, you’ve (almost) vanished.
Mistake #5) Confusing The Solar Incentives.
Isn’t there a rebate? Aren’t they going to send us cheques instead of bills?
Every year there are frantic marketing claims made about “getting in before the rebates drop” which is a pressure sales half-truth. Put simply, the federal government incentive does fall marginally every year but generally so does the price of solar.
The Nationwide Rebate
When you buy a solar power system, there are still thousands of dollars on offer, but it’s not the federal treasury providing a subsidy, rather Australia’s 200 biggest polluters are obliged to shell out. Roughly speaking they buy the glass panels for you to put on your roof, while you pay for the rest of the system.
Your Local Feed-In Tariff
The state-level incentives are generally feed-in tariffs. Years ago there were long-lived, rolled gold rates of 40 to 60 cents per kilowatt-hour offered for the electricity you exported. It was a perverse incentive, but it helped establish an industry using early adopters who were willing to pay ten times the price for this new technology. Those are the customers who had the money to spend up big (and have received fat cheques), but they’re largely a thing of the past.
Some states now put a floor price of about 6 cents per kilowatt hour and they “encourage” the retailers to top that up with a competitive rate to attract customers. Retailers might offer 10 cents or offer nothing, so depending on your electricity plan, you could export three, six or eight kilowatt hours in order to get one back for free after sunset.
Low feed-in-tariffs are depressing, but with a few smarts applied, you can often shift a lot of would-be exported solar energy to self-consumed solar electricity by shifting consumption and converting from gas to electric. And of course, a home battery (or home battery on wheels) is a great way to soak up excess daytime solar power.
Mistake #6) Not Understanding Your Warranties
Breaking News: the sky is blue and salesmen fly about telling porky pies. While you might find that hard to fathom, I can personally vouch that a saleswoman lied to me about solar last week. I guess it serves me right for lying about being a potential customer.
To be honest it was a minor detail, but even the most reputable people can sometimes resort to hyperbole or a little fear-mongering.
Good thing is that a new solar system quote now comes with a detailed graph showing what the electricity yield will be and a detailed calculation for return on investment. If your salesperson can’t explain these things properly or scrawls them on the back of an envelope before pushing a contract at you, it’s your turn to push them out the door.
The warranty on solar has become a little bit ridiculous so it’s worth taking some time to understand.
Firstly, be aware that “tier 1” solar panels aren’t necessarily the best quality, that little piece of industry jargon is actually an indication of how healthy the accountants think the company is. Think of “tier 1” as an indication as to whether the manufacturer will be around to honour the warranty. Maybe.
Solar panels are long-lived and panel manufacturers have been trying to differentiate themselves with warranties, moving from 20 to 25 years (and in some cases, even 40 year performance warranties are on offer). Who is actually going to be around to honour them we don’t know.
Performance (or speed of degradation if you’re a pessimist) was generally 90% at ten years and 80% at twenty or twenty-five years. Some makers have closed this up with higher thresholds at decreased times, perhaps 95% at 7.5 years, 90% at 12.5 years and 85% at 15 years, along with other electrical jargon or claims about how they are so tough they literally have balls of steel.
If you’re within 200 metres of the coast, make sure they don’t have an out clause for corrosion damage.
A dishonest salesman will try to infer that the headline “performance warranty” will cover anything that goes wrong, while the fine print says that the panel warranty could be as little as 5 years.
Your quote must have panel details and a local website with an onshore phone number for support. Warranty is worthless if they expect you to post the panels back overseas for testing. Be aware that some donkeys will quote a system they never intend to deliver. You’ll find installers on the day have a substitute panel or inverter and if challenged, a paltry compensation payment to justify swapping brands or models.
Maintenance plans aren’t required to maintain warranty. An annual clean might be prudent, especially in a bushfire zone, but if anyone walks on the glass or points a pressure washer at your panels, they should be thrown from the roof.
As an experienced installer and fault finder, I really recommend a qualified electrician does a service every 5 years. In fact, many electricity network providers make it a requirement. It’s hardly enforced but when you sign up for a solar connection to the grid, you’re agreeing with the network operator to keep your equipment in order (see an example here).
In reality, there are actually four separate warranties you get when you buy your solar power system – the ‘performance warranty’ being one of them. The other three are for your inverter, the panels themselves, and the workmanship. In terms of warranty, what you really want to look for is:
- A 10-year warranty for your solar inverter
- A 10-year warranty for your solar panels
- A 5-year warranty for the workmanship
Mistake #7) Not Knowing What Size System Is Right For You
This mistake is getting easier to solve. These days the CEC obliges solar installers to offer written quotes with detailed information. Reputable installers will sit you down and do a full analysis of your electricity usage habits before they provide you with a quote.
They will ask you what your financial goals are, how much you’re willing to spend in order to accomplish those goals, and whether you plan to get an electric car soon – because it’s not as simple as purchasing a solar power system size that matches your energy usage right now.
Despite the hype about solar battery storage, any honest solar installer will give you the same advice: Batteries will not pay for themselves at the speed solar power does.
An unsubsidised Tesla Powerwall battery system will currently cost you at least $16,000 to install and using typical, current tariffs will take about 15 years to pay back. The unit is warranted to last 10 years. Right now the numbers only stack up if there’s a special use case, like blackout protection that saves your aquarium full of expensive pet fish from dying. You’ll have to do the maths on that personally.
However… the figures for 15 years’ payback are going to improve radically if the retail contracts I’ve seen in the last few days are anything to go by.
If you receive 6 cents of credit for energy exported but have to pay 80 cents for the same energy imported between 3pm & 1am… storage saves you 74 cents per unit.
If a 10 kWh battery is appropriate for your house, you drain the battery every evening, and you get forced onto one of these horrible plans, that’s a back-of-the-envelope saving of over $7 every night or $2700 every year. Maybe the long-awaited battery boom is about to happen.
Batteries aren’t the be-all and end-all. I wouldn’t recommend you join a virtual power plant to get rich quick, but there are great use cases. For instance, Emma my favourite catering queen with a commercial kitchen in her garden could easily justify $30,000 spent on solar and battery storage. Why? it’ll pay for itself as soon as the next prolonged power cut hits by keeping $30,000 in food stock refrigerated.
My own maxim is this: after 14+ years I have never met a customer who has complained that they installed too much solar. So if you have money in the bank or down the back of the couch, it’s probably better bolted to the roof.
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I am always unsure why there is a constant commentary about bolting more solar on your roof….without a battery…we always pay before the sun shines and after it goes down..my solar during the day pays for all my AM usage..therefore more solar panels would only achieve GIVING more to the grid and getting paid a pittance for the FIT.
Am I on the right track ?
Hi Noel,
The way I like to explain it is like this :
-your solar electricity is cheaper than grid electricity.
-no matter the time of day, a larger system will generate more power
-so if there’s any daylight, you’re more likely to be using your own energy
So even on a grey winters day, when your system is only producing 10% of it’s rated output… 10% of 13.2kW will still be enough to heat with a modest split system air conditioner. Come summer time you’ll romp it in.
Best of all the systems you buy now cost around 10% of the price you would have paid 10 years ago.
Cheers
Yes in most places in Australia it can be worthwhile to over produce in summer to reduce your deficit in winter.
I installed 12.8 kw last December and was in deficit during March, June and July.
My plan is to in the near future install another 5kw or so on a roof which will get lots of winter sun, but less of a percentage of summer sun.
It will also help support a 2nd EV as my kids are near driving age.
Hey David
I’m getting a 13.2kW system installed in November and seeing it’s similar size to yours, wondering what your power usage is for the months you’re in deficit.
Thanks
Mick
Is there any evidence that running your solar system at peak rated output, lessens the inverter life? The option being to keep the input lower, and lessen the heat generated.
Hi
I understand what you’re saying, and before I had my system installed about 15 months ago I read Finn’s guide as well as anything else I could find on the subject within easy reach. I researched the available options exhaustively along with a friend who was at the same point in his journey. We examined every supplier who serviced the area, and constructed a matrix on Excel of all their pros and cons. We are both retired but tertiary-educated and well used to such exercises (I worked for Consumer Affairs in NSW in the early days).
After many weeks of comparing notes, we had each reached the same conclusions. The top three suppliers weren’t the cheapest but were all local, two of them known to us. These three plus others such as Origin Energy promised savings in our energy bills of between 80 and 90 per cent. It all sounded, well … too good to be true!
And indeed it was. My first year’s electricity bills showed savings of around 40 per cent in spite of the fact I had rationalised every aspect of my power usage, minimising consumption during peak periods by all available means. 40 per cent is, um, good – but it’s nowhere near what I was promised. Yes, my FIT was reduced from a miserly 6c to an insulting 5c per wWh, and my tariff rose by 13 per cent halfway through the most recent quarter. Yes it was a rainy and cloudy winter, but it was significantly warmer than our average winter (very few nights below freezing), meaning my need for heating should have been less than in previous years.
My recent winter quarter bill was almost the same as it was two years ago when I had no solar panels. My consumption, in spite of my diligent efforts to save energy, has reduced very little.
I continue to heat the house with very efficient air conditioning supplemented by a slow combustion log fire on cold and sunless days. I heat my water with roof-mounted panels. The house is well insulated.
Am I alone in feeling this has all been a waste of time?
Doesn’t sound right. Have you done the exercise of recording what your system has produced each month, what was exported, and what you have bought from the grid? From this you can work out how much solar you have used, and calculate your self consumption percentage. Perhaps there is an issue with your panels – are they producing the maximum amount on a sunny day? Or is there issue with bird poop, dirt or shading which might be significantly impacting your output? And some inverters de-rate when the temperature gets hot (over 45 degrees C).
No I haven’t embarked on such a forensic exercise. Like any other diligent solar user I try to minimise my feed-in, to the extent that on a rare sunny day in winter I will run the air conditioner almost non-stop and heat the house up more than is necessary during the day. This I hope decreases the amount I need to draw on the grid after dark and reduces my feed-in at 5c/kWh. Being retired, I’m home most of the time, and spend a lot of time checking my solar production so I know when to turn on the dishwasher or the kettle.
Of course we have had few sunny days this winter, while in summer our temperature never gets anywhere near 45C.
Panels are fine – clean with minimal shading. They reach their maximum output of slightly over 5kW when the day is fine and bright.
I had hoped my diligence would have produced a better result. Does anyone achieve anywhere near 80 or 90 per cent savings over a quarter or a year?
Hey Kerry
Something is obviously not right, and as someone who is just about to take the plunge, I’d love to know where you are, what size system you have installed, what your usage of electricity is, and what you were promised.
Is the system not performing how it is supposed to or were promised things that simply aren’t possible given the system you have installed? I’d love to know.
Is your system simply throttling back due to high line voltage in your street? Your FIT numbers would indicate whether you’re exporting. Without consumption metering, it is hard to know how much is self generated. Is your solar array producing anything at all? It seems a pity to have abrogated all responsibility as a self generator, to just submit to the care of a competing monopolistic one for the little information available there.
Or do the closing sentences merely indicate that self production remains at 40%, but increasing charges have now eaten all of that saving? In that case, the installation has protected against a 40% cost increase, it would seem.
Clarification comes from tabling consumption, self generation, import, and export, together with related tariffs. (Out with the spreadsheet again. 😉
Having had council rates triple in recent years, I have a certain jaundiced suspicion about where the money went. House prices dropping, yet rents increasing rampantly, anyone? The money vacuum cleaner is turned to high, not just to pay for the Covid stimulus squillions, but years of USA money printing, most of which was invested in speculation. Don’t ask what it’s doing to our superannuation. Self consumed solar, rainwater tanks, and a vegetable garden are all rolled gold sustainability assets beyond price, I figure. Heck, once we have an EV and V2H, even the battery is worth having.
Hi Kerry,
Apologies for not getting back to you sooner but I’ve been roughly in your neck of the woods, trying to avoid the flooded roads getting to Dubbo in fact.
It does sound like you’re pretty diligent with energy management so I thought I’d ask if you had done any further analysis of the system or your use?
You may well be correct that TOU metering hasn’t worked in your favour however the saving grace of new internet connected meters is that you can get raw numbers from the DNSP. They call it interval data and it’s what the retailers use to generate your bill.
Does your solar system have it’s own monitoring platform? An app on your phone perhaps? Even the most basic inverters will be able to tell you what they’ve actually generated, which is a number you can compare with the paperwork which your installer is obliged to give you.
Sometimes the assumptions made in the sales process aren’t detailed enough, (nobody except school students does an onsite suneye graph) and so the calculations produced can be similarly incorrect.
It sounds like you could use a monitoring device, a “smart meter” in the switchboard which allows you (and the inverter) to see what is going where and exactly when. Knowledge is power in these matters.
The other thing to bear in mind is that things like wood heaters are fundamentally leaky devices. There’s nothing as good as them for heat, I know first hand, but they also suck about 4 rooms full of air out of the building and up the flue every hour, causing cold air to leak into the house.
Please let us know if you can round up any more numbers and we’ll look into it if you’d like.
Cheers
Anthony
Thanks Michael. I’d love to know what’s wrong too! The installer is working on it but no result so far.
My working hypothesis atm is that moving from the flat-rate tariff to the ToU tariff has not worked in my favour. Of course, it’s designed to make money for the supplier, but as you can see I’ve gone to great lengths to minimise my use of peak tariff at 41 point something cents. For instance, to avoid heating the house on peak tariff when I get up in the morning, I have the air conditioner kick up a couple of degrees (ie from 16 to 18 deg) on off-peak at 5am so that by the time peak rates apply at 7am, all the hard work has already been done and the heater has only to maintain 18 deg thereafter. When the sun gets onto the roof, I then gradually raise the temperature to something more comfortable. If there’s no sun and it’s cold and wet, I usually light a log fire. But of course firewood is a lot more expensive than electricity! I guess that’s a pretty basic technique, but I wouldn’t know whether everyone does that.
I live in southern NSW, an hour north west of Canberra. I don’t have my consumption figures to hand. I’d have to get back to you on that.
I remember having a fireplace growing up in the suburbs in Sydney and firewood was free. Just about every week there would be adds for free firewood, which was usually old fences that had been replaced. A good-sized fence could last weeks with the addition of a few big logs you’d pick up from the local bush areas.
Maybe it is the fact that you’re now paying a fortune for the electricity you do use on the new TOU plan.
Another thing I learned in buying my 8kW Solar earlier this year, is that Sales provided quotes that included a graph of average kWh produced each month. 4 months on, my maximum daily production is LESS than each of the monthly AVERAGES. I am down 25%+ to what was expected. Seems like the graph was probably. for north facing in a Sydney, rather than Blue Mountains. The lesson is make sure you get all the assumptions that make up your quote. My system is working perfectly (high quality panels, Enphase inverter, EV charger, quality installer) but actual performance is a long way from expected performance.