Most people who call us about a battery already have panels on the roof. They were installed a few years ago, they’ve done their job, and the feed-in tariff that made exporting worthwhile has quietly shrunk to very little.
That’s the position a battery is genuinely built for. Instead of sending your daytime generation to the grid for a few cents, you keep it and use it at night — which is when most households actually use the most power.
Usually, yes. It’s the most common type of battery installation in Australia — most batteries fitted in recent years went onto solar systems that were already there, not new installs.
What determines it for your home is three things:
Your existing inverter. If you have a standard grid-tied inverter, we can add a battery alongside it with its own battery inverter, or replace it with a hybrid that handles both. Neither is wrong — they suit different situations and budgets.
Your switchboard. This is where retrofits get individual. Some boards are ready. Others need work before anything can be connected, and that changes the cost.
Where the battery goes. Location affects cabling runs, and cabling affects price. It also matters for backup, which is a separate decision from storage.
Two situations where we will tell you to wait.
If you still hold a premium feed-in tariff. Some older systems came with feed-in rates far above anything available today. If you’re on one of those and it still has years to run, exporting may genuinely be worth more to you than storing. We’d rather tell you that than sell you a battery.
If your daytime usage is already very high. If you’re home during the day and using most of what you generate as you generate it, there’s less left over to store, and the case is weaker.
We’d rather lose the sale than put a battery on a roof where the numbers don’t work.
Backup is a separate question from storage, and it’s worth understanding the difference.
A battery stores your solar. Backup keeps circuits alive when the grid goes down — and that’s wiring work, not just the battery itself. You can have some essential circuits kept on, or the whole house, and the two cost different amounts.
Plenty of people don’t set it up at first and add it later. If you lose power often where you live, it’s worth building in from the start.
The federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program reduces the upfront cost of an eligible home battery, and it applies to batteries added to existing solar — not just new systems.
It works through small-scale technology certificates, which your installer claims and applies as a discount at the point of sale. There’s no separate application for you to make.
The discount is set on a published schedule and reduces on 1 January 2027.
We don’t publish a dollar figure here, and that’s deliberate. Certificate values move. Anyone quoting you a fixed rebate amount without a date attached is guessing. We calculate yours on the day, from the published rates, and date-stamp it on your quote.
To tell you anything real about your home rather than about homes in general:
By the end of it you’ll know whether a battery makes sense on your existing system, what your switchboard needs, what the federal discount comes to for your specific setup on the day we quote, and what it looks like as a weekly figure rather than just a total.
If the answer is that you’re better off waiting, we’ll tell you that.
Book your Home Energy and Battery Assessment
Have a recent power bill nearby — it’s what lets us size this to your home rather than a brochure.