Home / News & Insights / What Nobody Tells You Before Buying Solar
The 8 things most quotes leave out not because they’re secrets, butbecause they’re inconvenient to mention before you sign.
Before getting into the specifics, it’s worth understanding the scale of the problem, because it explains why the rest of this article matters.
Government inspection data paints a genuinely sobering picture. As part of the compliance push under the Cheaper Home Batteries Program, Clean Energy Regulator inspections have found more than 60% of home battery installations checked were substandard, with a smaller but consistent share found to be unsafe. Commercial solar tells a similar story, with roughly 1 in 5 systems failing to meet technical compliance standards on inspection.
Separately and just as concerning is what happens when the installer itself disappears. Since 2011, more than 700 solar companies have gone out of business in Australia, according to consumer advocacy tracking. That’s left an estimated 600,000 to 700,000 households, around 1 in 3 of all systems installed nationally, as what the industry calls “solar orphans”: no workmanship warranty, no one to call for support, and often no easy way to even get the system serviced.
Neither of these numbers is meant to scare you off solar. Millions of Australian systems work exactly as they should. But they explain exactly why the rest of this article exists: most of what goes wrong with solar isn’t about the panels, it’s about who installed them, how, and whether that business is still standing to answer for it.
Every solar system in NSW is subject to an export limit, a cap on how much electricity you’re allowed to send back into the grid at any given moment, set by your local network distributor, not your installer or retailer. This matters because Sydney sits across two different networks with genuinely different rules:
What this means practically: two homes with an identical 10kW solar system, one on each side of the Ausgrid/Endeavour boundary, can end up with meaningfully different amounts of usable export value. This isn’t something most quotes explain upfront, and it’s not something you can simply negotiate away, but it is something a battery can substantially work around, since energy that can’t be exported can instead be stored and used at night rather than wasted.
If nobody’s told you which network you’re on, what your current export limit is, and whether a flexible export application is worth lodging, that’s a conversation worth having before you decide on system size.
“It comes with a warranty” is one of the most technically true and practically unhelpful things a quote can say, because there are at least four separate warranties involved in any solar system, each covering something different:
The uncomfortable truth: a strong panel warranty is worthless if the installer that provided the workmanship warranty isn’t still in business in five years and as the numbers above show, that’s not a remote possibility in this industry, it’s happened to roughly 1 in 3 Australian solar customers already. Ask any installer quoting you how long they’ve been trading and what happens to your workmanship warranty if they close down. It’s a fair question, and a good installer will have a straight answer.
Panels are, by and large, robust and reliable pieces of equipment. What causes most of the underperforming or faulty systems we get called out to inspect isn’t the panels. It’s the installation itself:
None of this shows up on a spec sheet, and it’s not something you can meaningfully assess from a quote alone. It comes down to the actual standard of the crew doing the work, and their track record for doing it the same way on every job.
If you’re installing solar now and planning to add a battery later, “battery ready” is a phrase worth interrogating rather than accepting at face value. It can mean genuine compatibility with a specific range of batteries, or it can mean, technically, that a battery could theoretically be added at some point, with no guarantee it’ll be straightforward or cost-effective when you actually get there.
Before you install solar with a future battery in mind, it’s worth asking specifically: which battery brands and models is this inverter actually compatible with, and what would need to change if I added one in two years versus now?
A well-installed solar system will typically outlast the roofing material underneath it if that roofing wasn’t already near the end of its life when the system went up. The problem is that removing and reinstalling panels to fix or replace a roof later costs real money, often more than it would have cost to sort the roof out first.
This is particularly relevant if your roof hasn’t been properly assessed before quoting. A genuine inspection should tell you honestly whether your roof has enough life left in it to be worth building solar on top of as-is, or whether it’s worth addressing first.
A significantly cheaper quote for a similar-looking system usually isn’t cheaper because the installer is simply more efficient. It’s more often cheaper because it’s cutting corners in one or more specific places:
None of this means the cheapest quote is automatically a bad one. It means it’s worth verifying and asking exactly what’s included, and what isn’t, before assuming two similarly priced quotes are actually offering the same thing.
None of this is designed to make solar sound complicated for the sake of it. It’s designed to help you ask the right questions before you sign anything, rather than finding out the hard way after the crew’s already been and gone. With more than 60% of inspected battery installations found substandard and roughly 1 in 3 solar customers left without a working warranty when their installer folds, the real risk in solar isn’t the technology. It’s who’s standing behind it, and for how long.
Sydney Solar and Roofing builds all of this into every quote as standard, and stands behind the workmanship on every job we do, because a quote that hides these details isn’t actually cheaper, it’s just cheaper to write. Book a free, on-site assessment and we’ll walk you through your export limit, your roof condition, and exactly what’s included, before you decide anything.
