The questions worth asking.

Your product warranty is written against SOFARSOLAR, the manufacturer — not against us as the distributor. SOFARSOLAR is a publicly listed company with audited accounts and regulated disclosure, which is a materially different risk profile to a private reseller. This matters because Australia has a long history of solar retailers taking deposits and closing, leaving customers with hardware nobody will honour. Ask any company quoting you whose balance sheet actually stands behind the paperwork, and whether you can go and read it.

Yes — and so is the hardware in essentially every other quote you will receive, including from brands with European names. The overwhelming majority of the world’s inverters and cells are manufactured in China. The meaningful question is not the country of manufacture but whether the manufacturer has been made to prove anything. SOFARSOLAR sells into Germany, Italy and Poland, which impose the strictest grid-compliance and power-quality requirements anywhere, and it has held EUPD Research “Top Brand PV” recognition across those markets since 2019. It is also BloombergNEF Tier 1 for storage and Wood Mackenzie Grade A.

We deliberately do not publish a headline price, because any number quoted before someone has looked at your roof is a guess dressed up as a quote. Real cost depends on roof orientation and pitch, shading, switchboard condition, whether you need a meter upgrade, single or three phase, storey height, and how much of your usage sits in daylight hours. What we will do is give you an itemised written quote with the STC rebate already deducted, so you can compare it line by line against anyone else’s.

For most Australian homes with reasonable daytime usage or a battery, yes — but the honest answer is that payback depends on your consumption pattern more than on the hardware. A household that uses most of its power after dark, has no battery, and exports to a low feed-in tariff will see a much longer payback than one that runs appliances during the day. We would rather model your actual usage and tell you if the numbers are marginal than sell you a system that disappoints.

Not necessarily, and anyone who tells you it is always worth it is selling rather than advising. A battery makes strong sense if you use a lot of power after sunset, if your feed-in tariff is low, if you want blackout protection, or if you intend to join a virtual power plant. It makes weaker sense if you already consume most of your generation during the day. As feed-in tariffs have fallen across most of the country, the balance has shifted toward storage — but it is still a per-household calculation.

Only if it is specifically configured to. A standard grid-connected solar system shuts down in a blackout by law — anti-islanding protection exists so the array cannot energise the network while linesworkers are repairing it. To keep running you need a hybrid inverter and a battery with backup capability, plus a dedicated backup circuit. Our hybrid inverters support this and switch over in well under a second, but it must be designed in at installation. If keeping the fridge and lights on through outages matters to you, say so before the system is designed.

The LFP cells we supply carry a ten-year warranty and are specified to retain a defined percentage of their original capacity at end of warranty term, which is the figure worth comparing between brands. Batteries degrade gradually rather than failing outright, so a ten-year-old battery is typically still useful, just smaller in effective capacity than when new. Cycle life matters more than calendar age if you are cycling daily.

A VPP aggregates thousands of home batteries so they can be dispatched together to support the grid at peak times, and participants are paid or credited for that. It can meaningfully improve the economics of a battery. The trade-off is that you give up some control over when your stored energy is used, and terms vary a lot between operators. Our hardware is VPP-capable so the option stays open, but joining one is a decision you make separately and later.

Yes. The products we supply appear on the Clean Energy Council approved product lists, which is a precondition for a system to be eligible for STCs. Inverters are certified to AS/NZS 4777.2, the Australian and New Zealand standard governing grid connection of inverter energy systems.

Inverters from 1 kW to 350 kW, covering single-phase residential through three-phase commercial and utility-scale, plus hybrid inverters and microinverter systems. Battery storage from 5 kWh residential stacks up to multi-megawatt commercial and utility systems. Because it is one manufacturer across the whole range, the inverter, battery, charger and monitoring are designed to work together rather than being integrated after the fact.

Panels degrade slowly and predictably — the industry convention is a performance warranty guaranteeing a defined output percentage at 25 years, and most panels continue producing beyond that at reduced output. Inverters are the shorter-lived component, generally the first thing replaced. That is precisely why the inverter warranty and the manufacturer standing behind it deserve more scrutiny than they usually get.