If Your Battery Dies, Your Bills Will Rocket. Here’s Who Should Pay.

A fortnight ago, 7.30 aired an investigation into Solar Power Nation, a retailer the ABC reports is under investigation by authorities in Queensland, NSW and South Australia after hundreds of complaints.

One customer, Amin Khorram, paid $13,000 for a battery system. Only one of the two inverters was installed, so he got 5 kW of the promised 10 kW and couldn’t charge or discharge his batteries fast enough to get all the savings he expected. He chased the company for eight months. The missing inverter finally appeared last month, as his QCAT hearing date approached. Funny, that.

But Mr Khorram isn’t just asking for the hardware he paid for. He’s also claiming almost $2,000 for the extra electricity he says he had to buy while his system underperformed.

He can do that. You can too. And a scary number of customers and plenty of solar retailers have no idea.

Under Australian Consumer Law, everything you buy comes with consumer guarantees. The goods must be of acceptable quality, fit for purpose, and match their description. The quote you signed is part of that description. Promised 10 kW and delivered 5 kW? That’s a failure to comply with a consumer guarantee. Battery dies unreasonably early? Same.

ACL also says that when a guarantee is breached, you can recover damages for any loss the failure caused, as long as that loss was reasonably foreseeable.

Back when solar was just panels, these claims were pocket change. If your 5 kW system died and took a month to fix, you lost maybe 20 kWh a day of generation, split between feed-in credits and self-consumption savings. Call it $5 a day. $150 for the month. Annoying, but nobody went broke over it.

But people with big batteries are almost always on tariffs that make perfect sense while the battery works, and are horrific without it. Punishing peak rates you never notice because you never touch the grid at peak. Cheap or free daytime windows you exploit to charge. Premium evening feed-in rates you harvest every night.

With capacities up to 50 kWh, the cost of a dead battery can easily top $20 a day. That’s $600 a month, accruing while your retailer’s support line rings out.

Now do the retailer’s maths. If they don’t have a dedicated service crew (the good ones do; the el-cheapos mostly don’t understand the concept), a battery replacement can take months. At $600 a month, the consequential loss claim on a single failed install will exceed the entire margin they made on the job.

The retailer can’t blame the manufacturer

The reflex move from many retailers is to blame the manufacturer, claiming there is nothing they can do.

The ACL says otherwise. Your claim is against the supplier who sold you the system. They must fix it and compensate you, whether the manufacturer does the right thing or not. The retailer then has the right to recover from the manufacturer. That fight is theirs to have. You are not required to wait for it.

This is why the best installers are so choosy about brands. They know that if the manufacturer’s support is rubbish, the liability falls on them as the retailer first.

Three caveats

1. You have a duty to mitigate your losses. If your battery is dead for months, you can’t sit on your battery-optimised tariff watching the meter spin and let the damages pile up. Switch to a sensible flat-rate plan and claim the remaining difference. Don’t make your own losses worse.
2. The loss must be reasonably foreseeable.
3. And a judgment is only worth what the company can pay. A tribunal win against a company that’s gone broke gets you a moral victory, not a cheque. It is increasingly common for cheap retailers to file for bankruptcy, then sell the name to a new entity that almost certainly has no legal requirement to look after the customers of the wound-up entity, despite trading under the same name. Check this hasn’t happened to you before you hit the tribunal. It’s scarily common at the cheap end of the solar market.

Why I Bang On About Margins

Every time I argue that installers need sustainable margins, someone accuses me of boosting rip-off prices. But that margin buys a service crew on standby that turns a three-month outage into a three-day one, and a balance sheet that can survive a warranty claim.

The battery rebate has pulled a flood of cheap hardware and cheap installs into the market. Some of it will fail. When it does, every failure at a $600-a-month tariff is a liability the retailer likely never priced in. If enough customers know their rights, the wave of claims will send the thin-margin operators to the wall. I won’t be sending flowers.