Is Solar Worth It
On The Sunshine Coast?

Southeast Queensland has close to the best solar resource of any populated part of Australia. That part is not in question. What determines whether solar is a good investment for your house is how much of what you generate you actually use yourself.

Self consumption is the whole game

Power you generate and use yourself saves you the full retail rate you would otherwise have paid. Power you export earns a feed in tariff that is a fraction of that. So a household that runs a pool pump, air conditioning and a dishwasher through the day gets a very different result from one that leaves at seven and returns at six.

Same roof, same panels, same weather. Two houses can have paybacks years apart purely because of when they use power.

Work out your own numbers

You do not need a salesperson to do this. Get your last four quarterly bills. Look at daily average usage, and if your retailer provides interval data, look at when that usage happens. Then ask the question: what proportion of my usage could plausibly be shifted into daylight hours?

• Pool pumps, dishwashers, washing machines and dryers can all be moved to the middle of the day
• Hot water on a timer during solar hours is one of the cheapest batteries available
• Air conditioning pre cooling in the afternoon costs you nothing extra when the sun is doing the work
• Anything that cannot be shifted is where a battery starts to make sense

Sizing: bigger is not automatically better

There is a point where adding panels only adds export, and export is paid at a low rate. We size systems against consumption data rather than roof space, and we will tell you when a smaller system has a better return than the larger one you were quoted elsewhere.

Roof orientation matters too. North maximises total generation. West shifts generation later into the afternoon, which for a household that gets home at five and turns the air conditioning on is often worth more than the higher total a north facing array would produce.

What about a battery?

A battery changes the picture if your evening usage is high, or if you want the house to keep running during an outage. Storm season on the coast makes that second point more valuable than the spreadsheet suggests.

If neither applies strongly, a sensible middle path is a battery ready system now and storage added later, once you have a year of real data about your own household. We set systems up so that is possible without replacing the inverter.

The things people do not budget for

• Switchboard upgrades, where older boards cannot accept a solar circuit compliantly
• Meter reconfiguration and network approval, which we handle as part of the job
• Shading from trees and neighbouring buildings, which needs assessing rather than assuming
• Roof condition, because taking panels off to replace a roof in five years is expensive

When we tell people not to do it

If your roof needs replacing, if the house is being sold within a year or two, or if your usage is genuinely tiny, we will say so. Occasionally the better spend is a switchboard upgrade and LED lighting, which cost a fraction of a solar system and reduce load immediately.

If you want an honest read on your own situation, send us four bills. Our solar and battery service page explains what we install and how we size it.