A battery earns its money at night, not at noon.
Whether storage pays for itself has almost nothing to do with how much power your roof makes. It depends on how much of that power you are currently exporting for a few cents and buying back after dark at full price. That gap is the entire business case.
When are you actually home?
A house that is empty from eight until six exports most of what it generates and buys back the evening at retail rates. Storage closes that gap and the payback is straightforward. A house with someone home all day already uses its own generation, so a battery has much less to capture.
This is why we ask for twelve months of billing data before recommending anything. Interval data shows the shape of your usage across the day, and the shape is what matters.
Usually worth it
High evening usage, an empty house during the day, an existing system exporting most of what it makes, and a feed-in tariff well below what you pay to import.
Worth modelling carefully
Electric hot water on a timer, an EV that could charge at midday instead, or a tariff with a genuine off-peak window. Sometimes re-timing those loads beats buying storage.
Usually not yet
Someone home all day already using the generation, low evening consumption, or a small existing system that rarely exports. We will say so.
Backup is a separate question
Not every battery keeps your lights on in a blackout, and those that do usually back up selected circuits rather than the whole house. If outages are your reason for buying, say so early — it changes the design and the price.
Bigger is not better, it is just more expensive.
A battery sized beyond your overnight usage spends most of the year partly full, earning nothing on the unused portion. We size to the evening and overnight load your data actually shows, and let you decide if you want headroom beyond that.
The federal rebate only covers the first 50 kWh of usable capacity, which is far more than a house needs, so it rarely constrains the decision.
What we give you
A model of your last twelve months with and without storage, using your own interval data.
The rebate applied, with the certificate price we used shown.
A payback figure with its assumptions written down, so you can argue with them.
What we install
Send us a bill and we will model it.
If the numbers do not work for your house, we would rather tell you than sell you a battery.