NSW Finally Opens Up The Garage Door To Batteries

Good news for battery customers in New South Wales – you can now join the rest of the country, installing battery systems within 600mm of garage door openings and other similar applications.

What exactly does this mean? Simply that NSW has now adopted the pragmatic approach everyone else takes to interpreting the rules.

Can You Install A Battery Near A Garage Door?

The basic principle behind what we’re explaining today is this; if there’s a fire, you don’t want it blocking an escape route from a building.

The rule says batteries cannot be installed within 600mm of a doorway, which makes some sense when you’re dealing with a personal access door that is around 800mm, or an additional 25% wider than the specified clearance.

However, for years now, customers in NSW have not been allowed to install a battery within 600mm of a garage door. The state authorities were blind to the fact a garage door might be 450% wider.

It seems the CEC specifically enlarged the most ridiculous part and NSW took the bait.

While every other Australian jurisdiction said yeah, 600mm is irrelevant when you can get 2, 3 or 5 metres away from the hazard. NSW said a door is a door and an exit is an exit. Reasoning didn’t come into the equation.

Rules Is Rules

It is not without reason that some people think Australia is a nanny state of regulation and red tape but we’re happy to report at least some of the apron strings have been loosened recently in an amendment to battery safety rules.

There are some pretty strict standards dictating just where you can install a home battery system, and for good reason. While battery fires are vanishingly small in number, like any flame in a building full of plastic, modern house fires are difficult to control and emit toxic smoke.

Despite the bollard, until now, this wasn’t a compliant install position in NSW.

We’ve explained before that the rules can make it hard to find a compliant location for battery installation. Many of them disappear if you’re 300mm from a wall, but if you’re really worried, an enclosure completely separate from the house might be the best plan.

Once cladding is installed around 3 sides, this little kiosk will afford excellent protection to the battery, well away from the house.

Going In The Garage

In many instances it makes perfectly good sense to put your solar equipment in the garage, not least of which being you may have an EV to charge, so wiring up to a solar sub board reduces expense and increases efficiency. Regardless though, the same reasons apply for keeping your car in there. Many people lament that cars, whether they’re full of flammable fossils or massive EV batteries, seem to have far fewer rules to comply with when parked in your garage.

It’s protected from the elements, which helps with:

• aesthetic aging;
• potential damage that’s outside of warranty;
• degraded performance at high temperature;
• derated charging at low temperatures;
• less chance of pestilence (geckos that jam up fans, ants which can ruin electronics).

Unlike a lazy old bucket full of lead and acid, Lithium batteries are a bit fussier about charge rate and temperature, all of which is controlled by a Battery Management System.

Plus there’s a better chance you’ll see a winking light that could indicate a fault, because let’s face it, not everybody checks their solar energy monitoring app when they wake up every morning.

For All The Pedants

Though the standards have now been updated, we must remember that the previous version was followed most piously by NSW – all other states went down a different path. A garage door is an exit, so it requires a clearance. Unless you can argue with a straight face that a garage door was not an exit?

NSW Department Of Fair Trading representatives on social media have indicated that state authorities are aware of the new standards change and are inspecting in accordance with those changes, and the install will be acceptable as long as distances are respected in accordance with these updated standards.

Amended Standards Are Out Now

There are quite a few changes which installers must make themselves aware of in the latest battery safety rule tweaks.

We’ll update you on the changes to how and when they might affect your battery installation as the information comes to hand, and more importantly, how people interpret it.

At the end of the day this situation has come about because of semantics about language and how one department chose to read the rules literally instead of sensibly.

However for now this one detail is a victory worth celebrating.

For more on home battery installs in garages, read my recent piece on whether bollards provide sufficient protection.