This is the story of Mathias Boer-Mah, a self-confessed tinkerer, energy nerd and SolarEdge Home Battery owner. Mathias wanted more control of his battery than SolarEdge could provide, so he hooked up his SolarEdge inverter to a free open-source software application for home automation. [Read more…]

If you have solar panels and are keen on getting a home battery for blackout protection, make sure you get the right one – and it’s correctly installed. [Read more…]

I remember the Tesla Powerwall 2 hitting the Australian market like it was just 7 years ago.  It was the shining white pioneer that lit the way, the stroke of marketing mastery, the name now appropriated by an entire industry to describe a brick full of batteries. [Read more…]

The Australian Standard for home battery installations is quite strict about where solar batteries can and can’t go. [Read more…]

What’s the difference between a home battery warranty and a game of musical chairs?

One is a situation in which people or things are moved, shuffled, or rearranged from one position to another, and the other is a game. [Read more…]

Watch one of Australia’s first SolarEdge Home Battery installations from go to whoa and discover what makes a top-notch solar battery install – including what sets installers apart when things go wrong. [Read more…]

Two years ago, I had a 6.6kW SolarEdge/Seraphim solar system installed on my house in Adelaide. A few months ago I decided to join the increasingly-less-exclusive club of home battery owners. [Read more…]

EV Battery Packs Have It Easy Compared To Home Batteries 

It has been two weeks since I laid down the heavy news that out of the 26 home batteries given a whirl by the Canberra Battery Test Centre, only two worked as they should without suffering a fault or excessive capacity deterioration.  This sad news has caused some people to wonder if electric car battery packs will have similar poor performance. [Read more…]

Origin Energy’s ‘Origin Loop’ Virtual Power Plant (Loop VPP) pays you to let Origin discharge your battery into the grid, but you must have an Origin retail electricity plan to use it. 

Even though there’s a big dollar incentive up front, I don’t think it’s a good deal overall. In this post, I’ll tell you why I’m not excited about the deal, and hopefully, that will help you decide for yourself whether to sign up. [Read more…]

For eight years, the Canberra Battery Test Centre lived up to its name and tested batteries. From 2016, they put 26 home batteries through their paces. If I had to sum up the results in a single word, it would be: [Read more…]