By Electrify 2800 Convenor, Sandra Crystall
Two and half years ago, we were in the happy situation of having some funds left over from a domestic repair job. We could have gone on an extra big holiday, but chose to invest it also in our home and future.
Having first installed solar panels in 2007 we decided it was time to get a battery and, given that there’s a lot of battery talk going on at the moment, I’m sharing my experience and lessons learned. If you’re looking for information referring to watts and capacity, sorry, you have to look somewhere else but you may save money and yourself some inconvenience if you read on.
We’re going to get a battery!
There was much excitement and talk in the household, and I was telling anyone who’d listen. One of those folk talked about changing our energy provider. We were happy with Red Energy, but if we were going to have a battery Amber was the provider to go with. So, we jumped. We were on a set rate with Red while our rate with Amber was a time of use rate. Very quickly we changed our eating habits to having the main meal in the middle of the day when electricity is cheaper or we were using our own.
“Very quickly we changed our eating habits to having the main meal in the middle of the day when electricity is cheaper or we were using our own.”
Better get it quick!
But where? And, who from? My friends had talked about their happy experiences with a local supplier, but I didn’t know of anyone else in the area. The recommended business was very busy dealing with a national recall on the battery product they sold, and we didn’t want to wait until that was all sorted. We didn’t see any other local businesses marketing batteries. So, what do we do? We asked our retailer … and that was how we did something we always tried to avoid … we shopped away from home.
But wait!
The response from Amber was fast and helpful. They referred us on to their recommended supplier of a very efficient system, SolarEdge. There wasn’t an installer Central West, and probably not west of the Great Dividing Range, that installed the system but that wasn’t a problem, a contractor would be sent out for the install. The roof was assessed and a quote given using satellite images, which was a surprise and spooky- the level of detail!
The install day arrived and nothing happened, no one, no phone call. Apparently, there had been an incident. Two hours after the appointment time and 30 minutes after our first attempt to contact them, a new install time was being arranged. We had new solar panels and a battery a month later! Despite being told at the point of sale that the old panels would be recycled, when asked, the installers said they would be taking them to landfill. We kept the panels and thought about advertising them, but decided that their age made them a lot less efficient than what is now available and it would be better to promote efficiency. We took them to Orange’s Resource Recovery Centre and they were sent away to Cootamundra for recycling.
We have … no power
In late January 2025, Orange experienced a weather event that left over 1,000 homes, including ours, without power for many hours, and overnight. “Why do we have no power? We have a battery!? We reached out to Amber and SmartEnergyAnswers (the SolarEdge retailer), and…I couldn’t remember if the issue came up at the time of purchase, but…. our inverter didn’t have a back-up unit. A quote was provided.
Social media isn’t all bad and we got lucky. It was through social media I learnt that a local electrician had recently been licensed to install SolarEdge Systems. Brad Collins visited and gave us a quote within days. The quote was comparable with the out-of-town quote, but there were still few more decisions to make.
Electrician Brad Collins and his apprentice Kobe working on the inverter unit installation.
What do we need the most?
When the grid goes down and the battery is the only thing powering the home, it’s important not to waste energy on the non-essentials. A friend had told me how frustrating it was in the January outage that the battery kept the lights on but not the fridge. The first couple of hours of the upgrade day were spent identifying what circuit served what part of the house – one of the joys of living in a home that has seen many years of renovation projects – and dividing the power board into ‘essentials’ and ‘can live without’. It wasn’t essential but we also chose to upgrade the power board to the latest standards.
There’s a planned outage, no worries we … don’t have power
I totally understand that the Essential Energy engineers don’t want to be killed by our battery feeding back into the grid while they are working on it: the system knows that, but the workers who came to our home to check didn’t. If only they had rung our electrician before touching anything. Anyway, that little survey that most service providers now send out even if one of their staff just says ‘hello’ isn’t all bad. I used it to provide some advice on the need for Essential Energy to be ready for the tsunami of batteries their staff are about to encounter.
We are a Virtual Power Plant
We became a Virtual Power Plant, pretty much as soon as the battery was installed.
Amber manages the system for us.
- We don’t export power unless we are getting paid for it.
- We import if the battery hasn’t charged and there is an over-supply on the grid, and
- When power is in demand, such as ‘peak time’ between 5pm and 8pm, we export at premium prices to the grid.
I have the Amber app on my phone, my husband the Solar Edge app. Our electrician can also see what is going on with our system and we all will receive warnings if something isn’t right.
The connection to the grid is our biggest expense but we have been in credit on most of our bills. In July-August 2025, it was $191.00 in credit- that’s running our reverse cycle air con on heating mode, at 18 degrees, 24 hours a day.
Could we be doing better? Maybe, but I haven’t looked. We are happy with the system we have and, despite the initial glitches, the service we have received from SolarEdge, Amber and especially Brad Collins (BC Electrical & Refrigeration) has been exceptional.
The Federal Government’s Energy Made Easy tool is a way to find a cheaper energy provider
NSW Government’s list of Virtual Power Providers
We don’t know what we don’t know. Having access to people who know what questions to ask and where to get answers is where Electrify2800 can help.
Send us email to electrify2800@gmail.com or Facebook message and they will do our very best to help you out, or connect you with those who can.
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