Why people promote 6.6kW systems?

I want to talk about why everybody is advertising 6.6 kilowatt solar systems at the moment. If you’ve been looking at solar, all the advertised prices that you see are going to be for a 6.6 kilowatt system. Why is that? It seems weird that everyone’s gravitated towards that system size as being an ideal or a standard. The reason for it is that it’s a convenient bundle for suppliers or installers to use.

It’s the maximum number of panels that you can have on a 5-kilowatt inverter. Because of that, it’s just become something that’s easy to offer. It’s an easy price comparison to make, but that’s not always the best system to get, could be that you need a smaller than that, or it could be that they’re larger. Often we see people putting on systems of 10 kilowatts or slightly over on their homes. The 6.6 is a little bit comical for those of us who are in the industry, and everyone is just advertising that as a standard solution. Moving away from that as a cookie cutter solution, what we would typically do is look at the amount of power that you’re using, when you are using it, and, of course, your roof space, and your roof space sets the upper limit of what system size you can get, but it may also not be the ideal size, it could be too large.

So we’ll look at a range of factors, including the extent that you want to future-proof your system. It could be that you want to put a larger system on because you are concerned or interested in getting batteries within a period of time. That’s also a very good reason for putting a larger system on. But we will look at those, we will explain the choice of system size as well as the choice of components to you and do a proposal that takes all those things into account and makes it very clear what it is that you’re going to get and what the savings are going to be. If you are looking at solar and you’re frustrated by all this conflicting advice, then please, let’s have a chat and we can clarify all that and actually give you advice on the right-sized system for you.