One in Four Solar Owners Is Disappointed. Here Is What the New Finder Data Actually Shows.

The same Finder report found 47 per cent of Australians are paying more for electricity than they were twelve months ago. Nineteen per cent said their bill was much higher and another 28 per cent noticed a smaller increase. That works out to more than 10 million people who have watched their power bill climb over the past year. The average quarterly bill was sitting at about $394.40 as at July 2026.

Baby Boomers are copping it hardest, or at least noticing it most: 25 per cent said their bill was much higher, against 19 per cent across all age groups. Looking forward, close to half of Australians expect their bills to rise again over the coming year, and among Boomers that climbs to 60 per cent.

As Finder’s utilities expert Mariam Gabaji put it, “Electricity is one of those bills that’s impossible to avoid”. That is the context for the solar disappointment number. People did not install solar as a hobby. They installed it to stop this exact thing from happening, and for a quarter of them it has not worked as advertised.

Modern panels are boringly reliable. Failure rates are low, degradation is slow and predictable, and most systems installed in the last decade are producing roughly what the physics says they should. If 26 per cent of owners were disappointed because a quarter of Australian solar systems were broken, that would be a scandal and you would have heard about it.

What actually changed is the price someone else pays you for your surplus. A decade and a half ago, generous state feed-in tariff schemes paid 40 to 60 cents per kilowatt hour, and the sales pitch wrote itself: put panels on the roof, export the excess, let the meter run backwards. Those schemes closed to new entrants years ago. Today, 45 per cent of solar owners are on five cents or less, and some retailers have moved to token rates or none at all on certain plans.

Meanwhile the price you pay to buy electricity has gone the other way. Depending on your state, retailer and tariff, you are likely paying somewhere in the region of 30 to 45 cents per kilowatt hour for grid power. So the two halves of the equation have pulled apart badly.

A kilowatt hour of solar that you use in your own house saves you the retail rate. Call it 35 cents as a middle-of-the-road figure. The identical kilowatt hour, exported because nobody was home to use it, earns you about five cents.

Same sunshine. Same panel. Same inverter. Seven times the value, purely depending on whether it went into your kettle or into the street. That ratio, somewhere in the range of six to nine times depending on your specific rates, is the single most important thing to understand about owning solar in 2026.

Now think about a typical household. The system generates hardest between about 10am and 3pm. Plenty of homes are empty in that window, with the dishwasher, washing machine and dryer all queued up to run at 7pm when everyone is home and the panels have stopped. That household exports the bulk of its generation at five cents and buys back its evening consumption at 35 cents. The system is working perfectly. The bill barely moves. And the owner ticks “disappointed” on a Finder survey, entirely reasonably.

In rough order of cost, lowest first.

Check the system is actually running. This sounds patronising and it is the most commonly skipped step. Inverter faults, tripped breakers after a storm, a dead string on one roof face, or a monitoring app that silently stopped reporting can run for months without anyone noticing, because nothing inside the house changes. Compare current output against the production estimate you were quoted for your postcode and orientation. If it is well short and it is not shade or weather, book an inspection.

Check what you are actually being paid, and what you are paying. Feed-in tariffs and usage rates vary a lot between retailers, and the plan that was competitive when you signed up may not be now. A plan with a slightly lower feed-in tariff but a materially cheaper usage rate is often better for a solar household, because you buy far more than you sell. Read both columns, not just the headline feed-in number.

Move your consumption into the sun. This is free and it is the biggest single lever most households have. Timers on the dishwasher and washing machine, pool pump running midday instead of overnight, hot water switched to a daytime heating window, EV charged in the afternoon where the schedule allows. Every kilowatt hour you shift from evening to midday is worth roughly the difference between 35 cents and 5 cents. Our guide on maximising self consumption goes through this in detail.

Then, and only then, consider storage. A battery is the structural fix for the timing mismatch, because it lets you keep your midday surplus and spend it at 7pm instead of selling it for five cents. With the federal Cheaper Home Batteries discount currently reducing upfront cost, the numbers are better than they were. But a battery is a large purchase, the payback depends heavily on how much surplus you actually have and what you pay for grid power, and it is not a fix for a household that is already using nearly everything it generates. Get the free steps done first, then run the numbers on your real consumption data rather than an average.

Some of that disappointment is on the industry. Systems have been sold on export income assumptions that stopped being true years before the sale, and sized for a feed-in tariff that no longer exists. If you were told your surplus would cover your bill and nobody mentioned that the rate was five cents, you were not given the full picture.

But it is worth keeping the other 72 per cent in view too. Nearly three quarters of solar owners in the same survey said their system met or beat expectations, in a year when 47 per cent of the country watched their bills climb. Solar has not stopped working. What has changed is that it now pays you by stopping you from buying power, not by paying you to sell it.

Households that understand that, and shift their usage accordingly, are in the 72 per cent. Households still waiting for the export cheque are in the 26 per cent. The difference is usually behaviour and plan choice, not hardware.

Figures in this article are from Finder’s 2026 Energy Report as reported in August 2026, including a solar owner subset of 391 respondents, and an average quarterly bill of $394.40 as at July 2026. Feed-in tariffs and usage rates differ by state, retailer and plan, and change regularly, so treat the cent figures here as indicative and check your own bill and your own plan. This is general information about energy costs, not personal financial advice.