Selling a Queensland home with solar, a battery or an EV charger

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Kooky

Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.

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A rooftop solar system is bolted to the house, wired into the switchboard and metered by the network. It is also tied to a retail electricity account in the seller's name, a connection contract with the distributor, a set of warranties, a compliance certificate and, quite often, a finance agreement. When the home is sold, those pieces do not all travel the same way. Some pass to the buyer with the land. Some end on the day the account changes hands. A few need a phone call, a payout or a login handed over before settlement.

This guide follows each piece in turn for a Queensland sale: the equipment, any money still owed on it, the feed-in tariff, the network connection, the warranties, the electrical safety paperwork and the safety switch notice the law requires of every seller. It closes with the documents worth gathering and what published research says about value. These are general rules; the answer for a particular home sits in its own contract and paperwork.

Queensland Government Solar Bonus Scheme page; Electrical Safety Regulation 2026, section 28; Clean Energy Regulator, Cheaper Home Batteries Program.

What goes with the house

The starting point is the ordinary law of fixtures. Something attached to land so that it has become part of it is sold with the land unless the contract says otherwise. Panels fixed to a roof frame, an inverter wired to the switchboard and a battery cabinet hard-wired into the home's circuits all sit comfortably on the fixture side of that line. So does a wall-mounted electric vehicle charger on its own circuit.

The standard contract used for most Queensland house sales reaches the same result in its own words. It sells the land together with its improvements, a term that takes in the fixed structures and the items fixed to them, and it gives the parties two lists: chattels included in the sale, and items excluded from it. The magazine's guide to fixtures and chattels covers how those lists work.

Two points are particular to energy equipment. The first is loose gear. A portable charging cable that plugs into a power point is not fixed to anything, so if the buyer expects it, it belongs on the included list. The second is equipment the seller would like to keep. A wall charger or battery the seller plans to take needs to be named as an excluded item, and its removal is work for a licensed electrician.

The table sets out where each piece usually lands.

When money is still owed on the system

Many systems are bought on a payment plan, a green loan or a personal loan. Others are not bought at all: under a lease or a power purchase agreement, a provider owns the equipment on the roof and the household pays a rental, or a price for each unit of electricity it uses.

A buyer's conveyancer may find a trace of that contract on the Personal Property Securities Register, the national register of security interests in personal property, where a financier or lessor can register against the person who owes the money. Whether such a registration still bites once the goods are bolted to a house is a legal question, because the Personal Property Securities Act 2009 leaves fixtures outside its reach. It defines them as "goods, other than crops, that are affixed to land", and the New South Wales Court of Appeal held in 2017, in a case about leased gas turbines, that the word carries its common law meaning. The register may therefore show a registration over a solar system, and the debt behind it remains real, even where the panels have legally become part of the house.

For the seller, the practical question is simpler. A financed system is normally paid out at or before settlement, like other debts tied to the home: the seller asks the financier for a payout figure calculated to the settlement date, the amount comes from the sale proceeds, and the financier releases any registration it holds. A lease or power purchase agreement works differently because the equipment belongs to someone else. The agreement itself says what happens on a sale: commonly a payout, a buyout of the equipment, or a transfer to the buyer if the buyer and the provider both agree. That takes time, so it belongs at the start of the sale.

The feed-in tariff does not come with the keys

A feed-in tariff is paid by an electricity retailer to an account holder. It is not a feature of the roof. When the home is sold, the seller's account closes, the buyer opens a new account with a retailer of the buyer's choosing, and whatever that retailer pays for exported power is what the buyer receives.

The difference matters most for homes still on the Solar Bonus Scheme, which pays 44 cents for each kilowatt-hour exported. The Queensland Government's page on the scheme says it is not available to new customers and that existing customers keep the rate, while they stay eligible, until it expires on 1 July 2028. Ergon Energy's retail pages add that it is open only to those who signed up before 10 July 2012. On a sale, the Government's wording leaves no doubt: the new owner or tenant "will not receive the 44 cent feed-in tariff unless the new owner or tenant is your spouse".

The same page lists ways the rate is lost before any sale, among them fitting a larger inverter or adding panels beyond the inverter's rating. A seller who upgraded years ago may already be off the scheme, so the latest bill is the place to confirm which tariff is being paid before anything is said in the advertising.

What the buyer gets instead depends on where the home is. In South East Queensland, the Government describes feed-in tariffs as market offers made by electricity retailers, so the rate is whatever the buyer's chosen retailer offers. In regional Queensland, the Queensland Competition Authority sets a flat rate each year for eligible customers of Ergon Energy Retail. Its final determination of 5 June 2026 put the rate at 6.006 cents per kilowatt-hour from 1 July 2026, down from 8.660 cents the year before, a fall it attributes to lower energy costs and better export data from digital meters.

Past bills still show how much the system exports, but the dollar credits on them belong to the seller's tariff and stop with it.

The network connection and export limits

Separate from the retail account is the connection to the poles and wires. Energex runs the network in South East Queensland and Ergon Energy Network runs it across the rest of the state. Every grid-connected solar system and battery sits under a connection contract with one of them, and Energex's guidance for homeowners is clear about the parties: even when an installer lodges the application, the contract formed by accepting the offer is "between you and us".

For a buyer moving into a home with solar already connected, Energex says there is nothing to do unless the system is on a negotiated contract; the deemed standard connection contract applies. What carries over in practice is the technical approval: the inverter capacity the distributor approved and the limit on how much the system may export. Those settings belong to the installation, not to the person.

That is why the approval paperwork is worth handing on. Energex states that any change to a system, such as altered settings, a swapped inverter, added panels or an added battery, needs an application approved before the work is done, so a buyer planning to expand will be asked what is already approved. Some homes are on what Energex calls a dynamic connection, which it says lets more excess energy be exported.

Chargers, batteries and the federal rebate

A hard-wired vehicle charger has its own network rules. Energex's guidance for electrical contractors says a car can be charged from a 10 amp or 15 amp power point on the home's main tariff, but that equipment above 20 amps, which covers the typical wall charger, must have active device management in place. For a common 32 amp single-phase charger it lists three permitted arrangements: an economy tariff controlled through a network device, the main tariff with basic management through a network device, or the main tariff with a dynamic connection. The arrangement shapes when the charger can draw full power, so a buyer will want to know which one applies.

Batteries raise a different question since the federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program began on 1 July 2025. It works through small-scale technology certificates, which the Clean Energy Regulator says most people assign to a registered agent in return for an upfront discount. Three of the Regulator's rules bear on a later sale. Only one solar battery system at a premises is eligible for certificates. A battery must stay installed at the premises until after 2030 or the end of its warranty period. And a battery is not eligible if it is re-installed at a new property.

Read together, those rules mean a seller who received the discount is expected to leave the battery where it is, and a buyer cannot claim a second discounted battery system at the same address. From 1 May 2026 the settings were also tightened, with the certificate factor falling from 8.4 to 6.8 for each kilowatt-hour and tapering for larger batteries, so a discount received early in the program is no guide to what an installation would attract now.

On the state side, the Queensland Government's Battery Booster rebate has closed, and its page says rebates are no longer available. As for the certificates created for the panels, the Regulator says they must be created within 12 months of installation and that upgrades or replacements of a system already claimed are not eligible. For nearly every existing system they were assigned at installation and showed up as a lower price, so nothing is left to hand to a buyer.

Warranties: what a buyer can rely on

A solar system usually carries several promises at once: manufacturers' warranties on the panels, the inverter and the battery, and the installer's warranty on its workmanship. Whether each can be claimed by a later owner depends first on its own terms. Some name the original purchaser, some follow the installation address, and some ask for a transfer form within a set time after a sale. The warranty documents are the only place that answer is found.

Beneath the written warranties sit the consumer guarantees in the Australian Consumer Law, which the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission describes as automatic and separate from any warranty a business chooses to offer. The law does not confine every benefit to the first buyer. Its definition of an "affected person" in relation to goods takes in the consumer who acquired them, a person who acquires the goods from that consumer other than for re-supply, and a person who derives title to them through the consumer. How far that helps the buyer of a house with a failing inverter depends on the facts and the age of the equipment, and is a matter for advice in the particular case.

One more layer is voluntary. The New Energy Tech Consumer Code is a consumer protection program for solar, batteries and similar products, administered day to day by the Clean Energy Council; it replaced the earlier Approved Solar Retailer program in February 2023. It binds only the businesses that have signed up. Where the original installer has since closed, the manufacturer's warranty and the consumer guarantees are what remain.

Electrical safety: certificates and the safety switch notice

Queensland's electrical safety rules were remade this year. WorkSafe Queensland says the Electrical Safety Regulation 2026 commenced on 1 September 2026, replacing the 2013 regulation that expired the day before, with new section numbers but, in its words, "no changes to the policy intent or the existing regulatory requirements".

Under those rules, the electrical contractor who installs or alters an installation gives a certificate to the person the work was done for. For installation work the document is a certificate of testing and compliance. WorkSafe's guidance says it records who the work was done for, the installation tested, the day of testing and the contractor's licence number, and certifies that the installation was tested as electrically safe and complies with the wiring rules. The contractor must keep a copy for at least five years. No rule makes the seller hand it to the buyer, but it is the plainest evidence that a licensed contractor installed and tested the system.

The safety switch rule is compulsory for every seller, with or without solar. Section 26 of the 2026 regulation requires the person transferring residential land to give the buyer written notice, on or before the day of possession, of whether an approved safety switch is installed for the general purpose socket-outlets, meaning the power point circuits. The Electrical Safety Office's guidance says the answer is declared on the standard sale contract and on the Form 24 lodged with the transfer; that form asks whether a safety switch is installed and whether the buyer has been told in writing. Section 27 requires notice to the regulator within 90 days of possession, which a properly completed form lodged with the transfer satisfies.

A solar installation does not answer the question by itself: the Electrical Safety Office notes that a solar system has its own isolator switches, which are different devices from a safety switch protecting the power points.

What the disclosure statement asks, and leaves out

Since 1 August 2025 a Queensland seller has had to give the buyer a disclosure statement before the contract is signed; the magazine's guide to preparing it covers the documents. For energy equipment, the form barely touches the subject. The Queensland Government's summary lists four parts: seller and property details; title, encumbrances and tenancies; land use, planning and environment; and buildings and structures, where the questions concern pools and notices under building and planning laws. None asks whether there is solar on the roof, how old it is or which tariff applies. The Government also lists matters the statement does not cover, among them the structural soundness of the building.

Silence in the form is not the end of the matter. Money owed on a system is something a conveyancer will weigh when the encumbrance questions are answered. And everything said in the marketing still has to be accurate under the general law on misleading conduct. A listing that promises a bill in credit, or a tariff that will lapse at settlement, is a risk the form does nothing to cure.

Units, townhouses and embedded networks

In a unit block, two further questions arise. The first is who owns the equipment. Panels on a common property roof may belong to the body corporate and feed the common area supply, or to one lot owner who installed them with the body corporate's approval. The body corporate's records show which.

The second is how the building buys its electricity. In an embedded network, the Queensland Government explains, the site has a single connection point to the grid, and the site owner or building manager usually buys power in bulk and on-sells it to the occupants. Residents may choose an outside retailer, but only if a retailer is willing to make an offer, and the Government warns that extra charges may apply. It also states that a resident who wants to install solar or a battery there needs the site owner's permission.

What to gather before the listing goes live

No single rule prescribes the following. It is the set of documents that answers the questions a buyer, a building inspector, a valuer and a conveyancer tend to ask, and most of it sits in the email the installer sent on the day the system was switched on.

The monitoring app deserves its own line. Most modern inverters, batteries and chargers report to an online account registered to the seller's email address, and a system handed over without it leaves the buyer unable to see what it is doing. Manufacturers and installers each have their own process for moving a system to a new owner's account. It is easier to arrange before settlement than after the seller has moved.

What the research says about value

There is published Australian research on solar and home values, and it supports a modest claim. Cotality's Watts It Worth report, published on 25 September 2025 with support from the Commonwealth Bank, compared almost six million homes and found that those with solar were valued about 2.7 per cent above comparable homes without it, roughly $23,100, after controlling for location, land size, dwelling type, floor area and other attributes.

The report's limits are as informative as its headline. The figure is a national association, not a measure of what any one system adds, and Cotality says the analysis is not meant to predict individual home values or replace a professional valuation. Batteries were not included as an attribute, and there is no finding on vehicle chargers.

Valuers who have commented strike a similar note. Valuation firm Acumentis, writing in November 2025, described solar as "one of the few upgrades that is visible, measurable, and warrantied", a statement about how readily it can be verified more than about its price. That brings the question back to the file: a system whose size, age, approval and warranty can be shown on paper is one a valuer and a buyer can take into account.

The equipment passes with the land. The tariff, the account and the logins pass only if someone does the work to move them.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Queensland Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for Queensland property professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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