1. SCT Certificates – federal government (~$17,000)

The discount is claimed by your installer, and taken off your installation bill.

This is the federal battery rebate program. You can claim these for up to 50kWh of batteries. If you get over 50kWh of batteries you can still claim, but it’s capped at 50 kWh. It’s called the ‘Cheaper Home Batteries Program’

https://www.dcceew.gov.au/energy/programs/cheaper-home-batteries

e.g. 2026. 8.4 STC/kWh, $35-$40 per STC

2. Virtual Power Plant incentive ($1015)

This must be claimed within 90 days of first connecting to a VPP in NSW.

(Only for batteries under 28kWh)

This is a one off payment of up to $1015 when you first connect to a VPP. You don’t need to stay with the VPP. After you receive the rebate you can change VPP or cancel your VPP.

This rebate is only available if your batteries are under 28kWh. If you get over 28kWh of batteries you cannot claim any rebate. (If you get 28kWh of battery, the rebate is $1015. If you get 29 kWh of battery, the rebate is $0).

3. VPP connection (~$200 one off)

This comes from your provider off your Bill.

This is the money an electricity provider pays you for being able to control your battery and take some power during peak times. They usually pay an annual fee for you to be connected to their VPP. This is what they pay you to be connected to their VPP, even if you export nothing. It’s like a subscription fee for them to subscribe to power form you.

Some Example Prices as of Feb 2026.

Origin Loop $200 credit

AGL $200 Credit plus $20 per quarter.

Engie $200 credit plus $20 per month

Energy Australia $15 per month

4. VPP Export Bonus (~$200 yearly)

This comes from your provider off your Bill.

Some providers also pay you a bonus for the electricity you export while on a VPP. Note: depending on the plan and time of day, you may get a feed in tariff for the power you sell, e.g. 6 cents per kWh. This is a bonus on top of that rate.

Origin $1/kWh during ‘Loop Events’ (capped at $200).

AGL $1/kWh (Capped at $250)

5. VPP Incentives ($300 – $600 yearly)

This comes from your provider off your Bill.

Some providers provide incentives to not use power during certain periods, eg if your overall usage is 0 during a time period.

AGL $600 bill credits if you overall export between 5-9pm.

GloBird ZeroHero $1 per day if you overall export between 6-8pm

Summary. There are 5 different kinds of payments you get for VPP, Government rebate on signup, provider bonus on signup, ongoing payment from company for staying connected, payment when you export in certain times, payment for not using any power in certain times. This is on top of any payment you already get for your feed-in tariff. It sounds a lot, but overall I’ve found they barely cover the monthly supply cost, if at all.

6. Referral Credits

This comes from your provider off your Bill.

This is an interesting one. When I went to sign up for Amber Electricity, it asked me for a ‘promo code’. I did a google search and found a code that gave me a discount of $10 per month off my bill.
But then when I signed up to Amber, they gave me a code that I could share with others. I don’t like flooding the internet with referral codes, so I didn’t post it to my facebook! But I did post it to the forum where I got my code from here, the Aussie referral links page on Reddit. I made back $80 on my bill. (9 people used my link!)

Amber $10 per month (Your own link is only available in the Amber app) e.g. https://mates.amber.com.au/MEQWVKKP

Globird $50 one off https://www.globirdenergy.com.au/refer/

Origin $50 one off https://www.originenergy.com.au/rewards/refer-a-friend/

7. Family Energy Rebate ($180)

Apply Online through Service NSW

For completeness I’ll list these even though they are not for battery. If you get Family Tax Benefit, there’s a rebate of $180 per year available off your electricity bill here:

https://www.service.nsw.gov.au/transaction/apply-for-the-family-energy-rebate-retail-customers

7. Low Income Help ($285)

Apply though your electircity provider.
If you hold a Health care card there is a $285 Household Rebate upon giving your Centrellink CRN to your electricity provider.

https://www.service.nsw.gov.au/transaction/apply-for-the-low-income-household-rebate-retail-customers

There are 2 rebates available. There’s the Australian Rebate for the installation of the battery, which covers batteries up to 50kWh. Then there the NSW rebate for joining a VPP, up to $1015.

I just went to apply for this rebate and it is not available if your batteries are more than 28kWh!

Here’s the fine print:

“The batteries must have a usable battery capacity greater than 2 kWh and less than 28 kWh as recorded on the approved product list specified by the Scheme Administrator.”

“To be eligible for this incentive you’ll need: 

An eligible battery up to 28kWh. All batteries installed with the NSW Government battery discount are eligible for virtual power plants. If you don’t have a battery, you might be eligible for a discount on installing a virtual power plant-compatible battery through the Australian Government’s Cheaper Home Batteries Program. Only batteries up to 28kWh in size can access this virtual power plant incentive.”

Note that it’s not capped at 28kWh, like National rebate is capped at 50kWh.

The rebate amount increases up to 28kWh but if you go over that you get zero rebate.

This may be helpful for you to know before you purchase your batteries.

On our last bill we came out $59 refund, mainly due to $80 worth of referral credits!

How to get your own URL to get referral credits.

Any AMBER user can get a code to give out to others to sign up.

If someone signs up using your code, both you and them get $10 off your bill for the next 12 months, a total of $120.

1. Firstly, you need to sign up yourself.
2. After you are signed up, go to your ‘settings’ on your Amber app then to ‘Claim my Code’ and you’ll get your own code that you can share. When you click and copy you’ll get a link this this:
   mates.amber.com.au/4HBHT3XK?utm_source=amber&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=AE537_Multi_Traffic_Generic&utm_term=&utm_content=referral_share_link

That’s the code you need to share to give yourself and others the discount.

It’s a bit long so you can delete everythign after the code, from ?utm onwards

So the link above becomes 4HBHT3XK

How to get your own CODE

If the person has already entered their home address and they are at the ‘promo cade page’ it’s too late to use the link Amber give you, unless you want to ether all your details again. The prompt looks like this.

In this case you need to enter the 8 digit code.

The code comes from the link above, after amber.com.au/ and before the ? so in the example above the code is 4HBHT3XK

How to share your code

This is where you start to make your own credit. You need to share your code in a polite way. Most forums ban the sharing of referral codes. Here are 3 great options to get you started.

1. Reddit referral forums

I got most of my referrals through the reddit thread called ReferralcodesAUS. This is good because it gets picked up by both Google search and by AI.

2. Post on Ozbargain

A great place to post your code is Ozbargain on this thread.
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/907837

It randomly gives people a code and if you add your code it will be added to the codes that Ozbargain gives to people.

3. Make your won webpage

Here’s mine – take a look!

Note about the Commbank Yello deal

The current ‘Exclusive’ CommBank Yello offer you see is exactly the same discount as the promo codes you get from another Amber user! It’s just $10 of per month for 12 months = $120. In otherwords, it’s a marketing gimmick from CommBank.
You don’t have to be a Commonwealth bank customer to get this deal. There’s nothing exclusive about it!
All it does is shift the other half of the $120 discount from another Amber user to Commbank themselves.
Here when you use someone elses code ot post your own to use, you spread the savings around instead of CommBank getting all the credit (literally!)

Enjoy

We just installed a 50 kW alpha ESS battery. The most logical usage would be to charge the battery during the daytime so that we are capturing our solar energy into the battery and then to feed any excess power that we are not using back into the grid in the evening from 6 pm to 9 pm when there are bonus rates for exporting. Here’s the problem. There is no way to set your home battery to export manually during these peak times.

I was assuming that I could just set my battery to export for example from 6 pm to 9 pm at night and this would allow me to boost the grid when it’s most needed and recharge the battery the next day using my solar. I was quite surprised when there was no way to export from the battery. I rang the installation company and they said this is due to NSW or Australian regulations that do not allow you to control when you manually export from your battery.

The real cost of electricity in New South Wales is that it’s cheaper in the daytime and much expensive at peak times like breakfast and dinner. So you want to EXPORT in peak times and IMPORT or charge form solar during off-peak times.

I found three possible solutions. None of them are perfect but they are all a step in the right direction.

Step one is the simplest.

1. Regular electricity provider with a VPP.

You can sign up for something called a VPP, a virtual power plant. You use electricity as normal, charging your battery from solar and using your battery to power your home. At times that the provider chooses, they can take electricity from your battery to charge the grid. This is turning complete control of your battery over to the electricity provider. AGL have a VPP plan. Origin have a VPP plan. This allows them to charge your battery when they want and discharge your battery when they want. They generally pay you a good fee (e.g $1 per kWh exported).  They control your battery 100%. You have no control over the VPP exports. And they pay you a set rate, lower than the actual electricity prices. So it’s basically a way for them to make money by using your battery, and give you a percentage of that. Very clever for them.

2. Amber ‘wholesale’ prices

There’s a company called Amber who offer you wholesale rates on electricity prices. They also give you an app that allows you some control over your battery. (You can choose to import and export in 1/2 hr blocks. And they also have some automation to charge and discharge your battery at the times they think is best to make you money. It’s very complex, because for most of the daylight hours in the day electricity prices to export are negative (yes it COSTS you to put electricity into the grid!) It’s hard to manage this because if your solar panels are generating and your battery is full you will lose money. It’s enlightening to see the actual electricity prices in real time. (I’ve seen them as high as $21.10/kWh (you make $21.10 per kWh to sell to the grid) and as low as -$0.95 (they pay you 95c per kWh to import! That’s right – they pay you to use electricity!

Being paid to use electricity.

Good export price.

3. Hack your Battery/inverter to override the inbuilt settings

If you are an engineer you can use Home Assistant to control your battery via Modbus. I found these instructions to be easy to follow and they work for an Alpha ESS battery system.

Alpha ESS Control via Modbus

Very nice installation by green.com.au and I’d recommend a solar install from them. We got 4x 13kW Alpha ESS battery modules. Ring ‭0485 977 502‬ and talk to Jack.

No affiliate links or commissions, I just love their work.

It’s very hard today to find contractors who take pride in their work and do the best job they can. These installers went above and beyond. I’m very happy with the professionalism of their install.

Problem with the NSW regulations

It’s the second day of my battery and I tried to set it up to charge during the day, then discharge back into the grid at night so as to boost the grid in the evening. It would not work. A quick search revealed this is the same case for everyone. From what I can work out, this feature is disabled in Australia so that you cannot set your battery to discharge during certain hours. It will only discharge when you are using it, you cannot set it to discharge into the grid. Very disappointing.

A kind of Solution: VPP

Today I signed up to Amber Energy, they supposedly allow you to discharge into the grid under a VPP (Virtual Power Plant) system. I’d prefer to retain control and charge and discharge when I want, but this seems to be the only way to do it You sign up to a VPP and they take control of your battery. I’ll post here as to whether it works or not.

In case it’s good, here’s a code I got to make $10 if I refer other people and they also get $10 off a month. If you use Amber feel free to use it.
HD3JGM7T
Give me a few days and I’ll let you know if it’s worth it.

Monitor Flow Rate

Need to monitor flow rate.

Go to Settings: Devices and Services then Helpers

Click on + Create Helper

Select Derivative

Choose your tank level as the sensor, then select the time duration.

The Helper will use calculate to give hte derivative of the sensor (turn the absolute level into a flow rate).

Watch the flow rate to determine normal values

Create a card in your dashboard and watch the flow rate for a few days.
You will be able to see what the flow rate normally is.

Create an Automation to detect large values

Create an automatic that says When flow rate is below ‘xxx’ warn me.

For me it was when dam tank derivative is below -0.18 send a notification via mobile_app_wayne with message “Dam tank is flowing fast”

The workaround is to zip the file in the terminal using: zip -r sliding-door.zip sliding-door/

(here sliding-door is the theme folder)

Strangely it’s true. If you ‘compress’ using the finder it fails. If you compress using the terminal it works.

It’s already been fixed, but the new version of WordPress is not released yet.

Description from WordPress Developer Forum:

If I zip a plugin folder using MacOS right-click Compress command in the contextual menu, those archives are no longer accepted when using upload plugin. It returns “Incompatible Archive”. This has worked up until now. Probably related to recent security updates for the plugin and theme uploader.

If I create a zip on the command line of the same folder that works correctly.

I recently uploaded a static site to Amazon S3. Here is my invoice of the costs:

Let me explain these AWS transfer cost and maybe you can save some money!

I had 20GB of sermons to upload to Amazon. Here’s how I did it.

Step 1. I was trying to use SFTP to upload the talks to Amazon directly from Bluehost. I tried this three times. It got about halfway each time when Amazon terminated the connection.
Estimated 30GB of uploads.

Step 2. I zipped the files and upladed them in one go to Amazon to the S3 bucket. Then I realised I could not unzip them. Rookie error.
Another 20GB uploads.

Step 3. I used Cyberduck to transfer all the files individually using SFTP. This worked! But every single file had the wrong MIME type set. So the files downloaded instead of serving to the browser. This is apparently a well-known bug.
Another 20GB uploads.

Step 4. I used ‘Transmit’ to upload the files into the s23 Bucket – it worked!!
Another 20GB.

So overall I’m estimating 110GB of transfers to get 20GB of files onto Amazon.
If I had used Transmit the first time around it would have probably cost $20 instead of $100. I hope you can learn from my mistakes!

Firstly I set up one of these, the cheapest I could find with the newer SX1302 chipset.

Worked fine with the devices, and the things network, but I could not get it to talk ot the MQQT server in Home Assistant.

Then 2nd try was one of these, RAK7268V2

It played more nicely with Home Assistant.

Setting up

1. Put in the IP address etc to get it set up in your network so you can see it’s home page.
2. I just selected Australia AU915 and left all the other settings to the default.
3. I plugged it in and it starts noting end devices even before I even told it about them:

Set up MQQT server to forward to Lorawan. Under configuration, Integration Interface, as follows:

Make an application

Add end device into that applications.

Now wait for it to show up here:

Here is the flow of data:

1. End Device (dragino temp sensor)
2. RAK LoRaWAN gateway
3. RAK MQTT packet forwarder
4. HA MQTT broker
5. Node-RED MQTT topic listener
6. Nore-RED fPort filter
7. Node-RED function to decode payload
8. Node-RED sensor entity
9. HA dashboard

All these elements need to be installed into Home Assistant.

The RAK gateway forwards nicely to Home Assistant. It’s a WISgate RAK7268V2

I started with a Milesight gateway and could not get it to forward vie MQTT to Home Assistant.

Here are the videos explaining how:

How to add a LoRaWAN end device to Home Assistant – Part 1

Part 2 – add the end device to the RAK

Part 3 – send a packet form the end device

Part 4 – listening to the MQTT message

Part 5 – setting the the decoder payload

Part 6 – creating a sensor entity (note this one has an error that is resolved in the next video!)

Part 7 Adding your device to the dashboard

Here’s the first one: