this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Yeah, to be fair, having a quick look at prices they seemed to have dropped a lot (I paid about 10k for a 5kwh solar system about 5 years ago), although I'm not sure if I trust some of those batteries, they're looking far too cheap.
I suppose a lot of the calculation is also dependent on use. We use about 7-9kwh per day during winter (no gas heating) which is only roughly 2.50 a day, one of the bigger killers comes from the >1 dollar a day for connection.
Yeah I’ve got a 42kWh battery and even with Amber I couldn’t make enough from feed-in to cancel out the subscription and daily connection fee. The average feed in rate I got over a month was a smidge over 6c/kWh. Not terrible but far below what some people make out that you’ll get.
Not to mention Amber’s “smartshift” “AI” is garbage, regularly leaving me with not enough battery to comfortable make it through the night, and then having to buy from the grid for hours.
I’ve switched to GloBird and their plan seems much better for me. I can fill the battery almost from empty to full in the 3 hours of free electricity, then they pay me $1/day for every day I don’t draw from the grid between 6-8pm, and pay 6c/kWh feed in (more if you can get on their VPP which I can’t). So now I set it up to charge for 3 goes every day, and export 7kWh every day, which covers their $1.42 daily supply fee. $0 bills here I come.
As an aside - how on earth can someone only use 7-9kWh a day? My pool filter/pump uses that much alone.
Oh yeah that would be interesting re: free energy period and charging the battery back up. I had crunched the numbers a while ago, but should look at it again. I'm guessing it's not possible to actually remove yourself from the grid fully so that you don't need to worry about the daily supply fee ?
We're pretty light on with energy usage, kids in bed early, no tv(still use screens obviously) generally no heating just some extra layers. Not sure.. I think it's probably the bloody kettle boiling that uses most of our power.. Edit: our base hourly usage is about 0.2kwh (say over night -fridge, router etc) then we really only have a spike in the morning and from about 6-8pm
Nah not possible to remove from the grid unfortunately.