Solar panels in Mackay

Where the installs are going

The Northern Beaches are where the growth has been: Rural View, Blacks Beach, Bucasia and Shoal Point have filled with new homes over the last decade, most of them with big Colorbond roofs and three-phase supply. Older Mackay, around West Mackay and North Mackay, has a lot of high-set homes from the sixties and seventies that have been adding solar steadily as the bills have climbed.

Roofs and homes in Mackay

Mackay is in a cyclone region, so mounting systems must be certified for it and installers must be able to show the engineering. Most roofs are corrugated iron or Colorbond, which is ideal. The wet season is the design consideration people forget: from December to March the sky is often overcast for days, so a system sized only on the dry-season average will under-deliver when the air conditioning is working hardest. Humidity is hard on inverters, and a good installer will put yours somewhere ventilated and out of the weather rather than on a west-facing wall.

The network: Ergon Energy

Ergon Energy runs the network. Single-phase homes are usually limited to a 5 kW export, three-phase homes can go larger, and bigger systems need a connection application. Mackay's mining and industrial workforce means a lot of households run high daytime loads on shift patterns, which suits solar well. A battery here covers the evening air conditioning and the storm-season outages that come with the territory. Three-phase supply is common in the newer estates and makes a larger system and a battery straightforward; older homes on single phase should ask about an upgrade before choosing the biggest array.