Solar panels in Sutherland

As an estimate, a 6.6kW system comes to about $3,990, a 10kW to about $5,490 and a 13.2kW to about $7,990, with the STC discount for postcode 2232 already taken off. Those are typical figures for a straightforward install, not a fixed price. If you are planning to electrify, it is usually worth going a size up at install rather than adding panels in a second visit — the labour and the scaffold are the expensive part and you only want to pay for them once.

Sutherland is in STC Zone 3, rating 1.382. In 2026 a 6.6kW system creates 45 certificates, worth roughly $1,710 off the price, and a 10kW system 69 certificates, roughly $2,622. It is a discount applied at the point of sale, not a grant you apply for afterwards. Separate incentives exist for batteries and, through other schemes, for some appliance upgrades — worth asking about, and not something we administer.

More, and by a wide margin, which is the opposite of what people expect. Solar pays best on the power you use yourself rather than the power you export — on our NSW modelling figures that is a 27c difference per kilowatt-hour. Moving cooking, hot water, heating and eventually a car onto electricity gives your system far more of your own consumption to supply. A house that halves its daytime export because it is now heating water at noon has not lost anything; it has converted 5c into 32c.

Solar first in most cases, then the appliances as they come due, and gas disconnection last. Solar first because everything that follows then runs on generation you already own, and because sizing is cheapest to get right once. Appliances as they fail rather than all at once, because replacing a working appliance to save running costs rarely pays back. And disconnection last for the reason below, which is the piece most people miss.

Because you keep paying the daily supply charge until the very last gas appliance is gone. That fixed charge is often the largest single line on a gas bill, and it does not shrink as you use less — a household down to one gas appliance is paying nearly the same standing cost as one using gas for everything. The saving is captured in one step, at the end. That also means the last appliance to convert is worth doing deliberately rather than leaving indefinitely, because it is holding the whole saving hostage.

Hot water, usually, because it is the largest single energy use in most homes and the most flexible about when it runs — which makes it the load that pairs best with a roof full of panels. Cooking tends to be the one people most want to change and the smallest in energy terms. Space heating sits in between and depends on your climate and your existing system. We do not install heat pumps, hot water systems or cooktops, so take that ordering as a view rather than a quote, and get the appliance advice from someone who fits them.

That is the question worth asking before you start rather than three appliances in. Plenty of housing in this area is old enough that the board was designed for a very different house, and each electric appliance you add takes a circuit and a share of the capacity. Having an electrician assess it once, at the start, is far cheaper than discovering the limit incrementally — and if a switchboard upgrade is coming anyway, doing it alongside the solar install saves paying for the same labour twice.

The distribution network that owns the poles and wires in your street approves it — not your retailer — and we lodge the application for you. On a flexible export connection, a complying system up to 30kW is automatically approved to export up to 10kW per phase. On a fixed export connection, the approval is 3kW per system. If your home has no reliable internet, exports are limited to a static 1.5kW per system until a connection is available. Note that an export limit restricts what you send back and never what you use — so a house that electrifies is less affected by it, not more.