At John's place up in Katoomba, at the forefront of their mind is the climate change issue. We've added a significant upgrade to their solar system, as well as batteries. So yeah, he is absolutely in the positive in terms of his carbon footprint. He's only using a handful of kilowatt hours a day, so yeah, he's absolutely doing his bit from an environmental point of view. In the Blue Mountains region, probably our biggest issue is shade from neighbouring trees. So another reason why we always want to go on site, have a close assessment of the customer's site and aspect, and we'll say, Well, this is the best solution for you.

At John's place in Katoomba, there are some trees around, it's quite a bushy block. To get the best out of the system, we installed some optimisers as well. So yeah, we're getting panel level performance and better outputs overall. Each panel connects to an optimiser, and that will negate any shading issues that we see on the roof as a whole. Where one panel doesn't drag down the others and have a negative effect on a panel that would normally be in the sun. So the battery is charged by excess solar power that's being produced during the daytime, so that they comfortably get through the night without having to buy any power off-the-grid at all. There's always the underlying environmental benefit of what solar can do.

A residential installation payback period will be sort of four to five years for a standard grid connect system. So there's obviously a design aspect to a solar system, and it's important to know the pros and cons of a particular design, How much is it going to save, etcetera. I find they want to make a solid investment that's going to sit up on their roof for 25 years, without any stress.