this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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Got off residential gas in Australia a few years ago. Bills are $600/yr for power, were up to $1500 one year for power+gas. At $600/yr a residential battery investment of $7k isn't worth it for my household. It won't run the AC because I've got a multi-split system for the bedrooms. Had I known I'd've gotten individual units for the bedrooms so I could get on on the battery backup system but I'm not cashed up enough to go pulling out a fairly new multi-AC to replace it with a bunch of individuals for the bedrooms so that I can get AC when the summer heat takes out the power.
e: love the downvote.
I have been thinking of getting a battery, not sure how much it costs to get installed though - labour more than equipment. Could significantly reduce bills, but they are not super expensive in the first place.
$7k AUD was for a ~42kw FoxESS battery with a 10kw Inverter. I need another $2-3k of work done on the house power supply first. I'm having a lot of trouble finding a sparky to do the mains upgrade that I need.
I thought that there were heat pump mini splits? Maybe not yet in Australia
There might be. Any of that stuff in Australia is very much "pay a licensed professional" to do the work, so it costs a fortune and companies defend their share in the market rather than embrace new tech.
Here in the US heat pumps are unreasonably expensive too... We already have AC, it's the same damn thing but backwards! There was a government credit to lower the cost, but I'm guessing that mostly affected the sticker price (since it was X% of the cost up to some maximum I think) so the heat pump company can make more. Adoption is more challenging if a building has older central AC as well, since we use different refrigerants now (much better for environment), but they run at a different pressure, so you need to replace the coils and all refrigerant lines, which is expensive.
Aren't they unable to do hot water, and pretty loud? Though I would have thought Australia would already have them for AC