We got solar panels!

In 2022 we bought a house in the northern suburbs of Melbourne and this year (2026) we finally had enough money saved up to get solar panels installed on our roof.

Photo looking up from the ground floor at the roof of a double-storey house. The house has a multi-level roof covered in pink concrete tiles. Various roof segments are oriented and angled towards different directions. Three of these segments have single solar panels installed on them. Text call-outs on the image point to each of these solar panels.

Buying solar panels in Australia is surprisingly straightforward these days. Here’s how I went about getting them.

1. Researched solar power for the home

These were some of the resources I used:

2. Figured out what we wanted from solar, now and in the future

In our case this was:

  • Short term: install as many solar panels as possible.

  • Medium term: replace our gas stove with an induction one and our instantaneous gas hot water system with an electric one (either storage or heat pump).

  • Long term: add a home battery and, once we buy an electric vehicle (EV), add an EV charger to our solar system.

This meant we didn’t want to get a basic solar system that would serve just our current needs. We wanted to get a system that would support our future electrification plans.

3. Found solar installers and got quotes

Finding good solar system installers can be a challenge but, fortunately, these two services got me free quotes from qualified and vetted installers:

  1. SolarQuotes, which is the service recommended by CHOICE. I’ve been a member of CHOICE since 2011 and those folks have never once steered me wrong.

  2. Solar Savers, which is a joint local government initiative that helps residents make the switch to solar power.

I ended up requesting two quotes from each service.

I also got a recommendation from a friend who’d had their solar system installed last year.

Graphic showing a collage of two website screenshots, one for SolarQuotes and one for Solar Savers.

4. Picked a solar installer and a solar system configuration

Most of the installers got in touch with me pretty quickly and I had good chats with all of them.

Three of the installers submitted formal quotes and we ended up picking the one that recommended the most appropriate system for our house and also had the best customer service.

This wasn’t the cheapest option presented to us, but it was the one that would give us the most bang-for-buck for our type of roof, because it turns out we have a “complex roof”.

Photo showing the green-and-gold, multi-layered, tall, pointy domes of Saint Sophia'‘s Cathedral in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Source: Jonathan Khoo on Flickr)

Finding an installer who does complex roofs

We have a concrete tile roof but, as you will have seen in the photo at the top of the post, instead of two large, flat surfaces that run the length of the house above the first floor, our roof has lots of smaller segments that are oriented (and, therefore, angled) towards different compass directions. Also, we have roof segments on both the ground and first floor.

Designing and installing a solar system around this type of segmented, multi-level roof takes time, effort, and money, which is something many (if not all) large solar installers don’t want to do. I learned this from the first installer who contacted me about providing a quote.

He was from a large company that (I learned) only does standard installs, which is probably why that company’s pricing is so competitive. After looking at our roof using his web mapping tool, he said he wouldn’t be submitting a quote. He then recommended I find a local, more specialised installer who would take the time to build a personalised and optimised system for us. This would cost us more, he said, but it would get us the best system.

The installer we ended up going with was Specialized Solar & Electrical (aka Spec Solar). Their system designer built us a customised system that, while more expensive than a similar design from another installer, was still within our budget.

Here’s a depiction of the physical layout of our final install, as shown in the SolarEdge smartphone app.

Screenshot of the Solar Edge smartphone app showing graphics of twelve solar panels and how they are physical laid out on the roof of a house. The solar panel elements of this graphic are shaded based on how much energy each panel is currently generating.

The Spec Solar designer managed to squeeze twelve solar panels onto our complex roof, but:

  • only six of these panels are oriented north (ie facing the sun all the time);

  • seven had to be installed as single panels on their own little roof segment; and

  • four had to be installed on ground-floor roof segments because there wasn’t enough space on our first-floor roof segments.

Complexity limits your choice of technology

Given the way we had to spread the solar panels out across different roof levels and orientations, as well as our plan to add a home battery in the future, our best option was to go with an optimised inverter system from SolarEdge. (The second-best option was a microinverter system from Enphase.)

The benefits of the optimised inverter approach are:

Optimised power: With a power optimiser sitting under each solar panel, our system can maintain the highest overall power output regardless of the output of each individual solar panel. Meaning the system’s overall output isn’t limited by panels that are producing the least amount of power at the time (because they’re in the shade or because they’re facing east or west) which is what would happen with a conventional string inverter system.

Battery ready: All SolarEdge inverters are hybrid inverters, which is the type of inverter you need if you want to add a home battery to your system. Had we gone with one of the cheaper quotes, we would have had to upgrade to a hybrid inverter once we were ready to install a battery. (And if we’d swapped to a hybrid inverter in that cheaper quote, its updated price would have been close to the quote we did end up going with.)

Future proofing: Even though our solar panels can produce a maximum of 5.7kW from the sun, we went with a 10kW inverter to convert all this DC current in to useable AC current. We wanted that extra capacity so that our future battery wouldn’t be constrained by the limits of our solar panels. EV chargers, for example, run at 7kW minimum. So to be able to use our (future) battery to charge our (future) EV, or to power the whole house at night off the battery, we’d need an inverter that could handle this higher load.

Graphic showing the working of an optimised solar inverter system. (Source: SolarQuotes)

There is one downside to picking the optimised inverter system we did, and that is being locked into the SolarEdge ecosystem. I’m okay with that though. SolarEdge is more expensive than its (relatively new) optimised-inverter competition, but its current line of products are reliable and they come with a good warranty.

In case you’re interested in the details, these are the components we got installed:

  • a SolarEdge SE10000H single-phase hybrid inverter and

  • twelve AIKO NEOSTAR 3S+54 dual-glass 480W solar panels (with SolarEdge optimisers under each one).

SpecSolar had actually quoted us for AIKO’s 475kW solar panels but those were out of stock at the time of installation, so they upgraded us to the 480kW panels without an extra charge.

Screenshot from a solar system quote showing system details for solar panels and and inverter, as well as a bar chart monthly energy production estimates.

5. Got the installation and inspection done

Once we agreed to proceed with SpecSolar, everything moved pretty quickly.

On 2 February the solar system designer came over to do a site inspection, after which he tweaked the design and sent us a final quote. We signed the quote that same day.

On 10 February the team from SpecSolar came over and did the installation. That took several hours, from 7am to around 3pm.

Photo taken from inside a residential garage with its roller door opened. On the floor of the garage are several large toolboxes, some of which are open. Other construction tools and equipment are also lying on the floor. Parked in the driveway, directly outside the garage, is a trailer filled half-way with uninstalled solar panels.

They don’t switch on your solar system the day they install it, by the way. The electrical part of this installation (the bit installed in our garage) needs to be inspected and signed-off by a licenced electrical inspector first. That happened on 19 February.

So 44 days after I first requested quotes, our solar system was switched on and connected to our house.

6. Activated our feed-in tariff

The final (and technically optional) step in this process was getting our electricity retailer and electricity provider – Momentum Energy and Jemena, respectively – to receive the excess solar power we were generating from our panels.

That whole process took over a month but, happily, SpecSolar managed it all on our behalf.

Our solar feed-in was switched on on 25 March. That means our excess power is now going back into the electricity grid, for which we are being paid a tiny amount ($1.18 for the six days in March that this was active, for example).

7. Profit

So how is everything going? It’s going pretty great, actually!

We generated a good amount of power

March is the first full month we’ve had these solar panels and, over the course of that month, they produced 125kWh of power. We, however, used only 24% of this power.

Screenshot from the SolarEdge smartphone app showing the energy balance from a solar system installation for the month of March 2026. The bar charts and text tell us that 125kWh of energy was produced, 76% of which went to the grid and 24% went to the home. Of the total energy consumed by the home, 52% of that came from the grid and 48% came from the sun.

It didn’t come as a surprise that we used less than a quarter of the power generated. In fact, that was part of the plan.

This solar system wasn’t provisioned for use in just the sunniest days of summer, it was provisioned to provide us with sufficient power even on the gloomiest days of winter.

The proportion of solar power we use in winter will be much higher!

We generated that power in spite of gloomy weather

March 2026 was actually a pretty cloudy month. Here is a table showing the month’s daily weather observations from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Screenshot showing a table titled, “Melbourne, Victoria March 2026 Daily Weather Observations”. The table shows daily minimum and maximum temperatures, as well as readings for rain and wind. It also shows a snapshot of these readings at 9am and 3pm on each day. (Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology)

The “Cld” (ie cloud cover) column under the 9am and 3pm sections shows the fraction of sky covered by cloud. This is measured in eights, meaning a score of 4 tells us that four-eighths (ie half) of the sky was covered by cloud.

This table tells us that, on 16 of the 31 days of March, we had cloud cover of 4 or above at both 9am and 3pm. And if you count-up the days in which we had cloud cover of 4 or above at either 9am or 3pm, there were 23 of those days in March.

What does this mean? It means we managed to use only 24% of the power generated by our solar panels during a month in which half the sky was covered in cloud for more than half the time :)

Basically, it means I’m confident that our system is provisioned suitably for whatever winter will throw at us.

We used a lot less power from the grid

What about the other side of the equation? How did generating solar power affect the amount of electricity we pulled from the grid?

According to our electricity bills:

  • In March 2025, we drew 291.9kWh of electricity from the grid.

  • In March 2026, we drew 157.1kWH of electricity from the grid – which is 54% of what we used this same time last year :)

That result is pretty much exactly what the Spec Solar predicted for us, by the way: an approximate halving of our electricity bill.

Screenshot of a smartphone notification from the Powerpal app with the title, “Your weekly report is ready!”. The notification reads, “You spent $28.46 – 46% less than last week. Check your report for more ways to save!”

But wait, there’s more!

Getting a solar system installed on our roof isn’t the only energy upgrade we did to our house this year. We also upgraded the insulation in our roof.

The roof above our house already had some insulation (likely around R4) but there were large gaps in the batts where there was no insulation at all. Also, the roof above our garage had zero insulation.

‘R’ is a measure of thermal resistance, by the way, and the level recommended for roofs in Melbourne is between R6.0 and R7.0.

What did we do?

We got R4.1 insulation added to our garage and to the gaps in the rest of our roof. And then we got R2.5 spray insulation added on top this R4.1 insulation.

This means our garage now has R4.1 insulation and our house has about R6.5 insulation :)

Photo of a roof cavity above a house showing the wooden pillars that support the tiles installed on top the roof. A thick layer of white spray insulation has been added to the the existing insulation.

Because of the reduced heat transfer from inside to outside, it will now cost us less to cool our house in summer and to heat our house in winter. In fact, as the weather in Melbourne has cooled, we’re already noticing that the temperature in the upstairs rooms doesn’t drop as quickly at night as it used to.

(We used Solar Savers to get quotes for this insulation installation too, by the way.)

What next?

Those are the only energy upgrades we had planned for this year.

With an approximate halving of our electricity bill, it should take us roughly seven to eight years to pay off our solar system investment. This includes the cost of regular cleaning and maintenance of the equipment we’ve just had installed.

Electric vehicle

If we drove our car a lot, upgrading that to an EV and getting an EV charger installed would be next on our list.

But we drive so little that we only fill-up on petrol every six to seven weeks, so upgrading to an EV is not worth the investment. (And EVs sure are expensive, especially first-hand ones!)

Household appliances

We’ll probably look into upgrading our stove and hot water system next, since both of those currently run on natural gas.

I don’t think that’ll happen for at least another four or five years though.

Home battery

Depending on how well our solar panels perform in winter, though, we might consider getting a home battery installed sooner rather than later.

The largest chunk of our annual electricity expenditure goes towards heating our house in winter, especially at night. If we find that our solar panels are generating enough excess energy during the day in winter – energy that’s enough to cover most or all of our nighttime heating – then it makes financial sense to store that excess in a home battery to use at night.

This will increase our payback time on the whole system, of course. The payback time on a home battery is about as the same as it is on solar panels: seven to eight years. But if the winter daytime excess energy numbers are good, then the total payback time of the combined systems might increase to only ten years instead of doubling to fourteen or fifteen years.

I’ll keep an eye on the stats over winter and we’ll make a determination either way in summer next year.

Enough solar for now

For now, though, we’re just going to enjoy having the sun power about half of our lives.

Sometimes there isn’t even much for the sun to power. A couple of weeks ago, for example, Nadia was teaching at uni and I was working from home. Even though it was a cloudy day with intermittent drizzles, our solar panels still managed to generate enough energy to export most of it to the grid!

(Things would have been different had I been running the air conditioner, dish washer, or washing machine, of course. But that’s not something we do every day in summer.)

Screenshot of the SolarEdge smartphone app showing the amount of energy currently being produced on a rainy, 22 degree Celsius day. 0.62kW of energy is being produced by the solar panels. 0.24kW of that is going to the home and 0.38kW of that is going to the grid.

For now we’re just happy with what we have. The rest we’ll figure out next year.