Over my last two posts I’ve laid out the battery story: more than 6 in 10 inspected installs rated substandard, and one state – Victoria – that inspects every system before it’s switched on and has cut serious safety issues by two-thirds.
So if you’re installing batteries anywhere else, and most of the country is, what actually protects you?
Not the rebate. Not the brochure.
Three things, and none of them are complicated.
The right crew on the right job.
Battery and solar work is prescribed electrical work for a reason – it needs an appropriately accredited installer who has done this type of system before, not whoever was free that week.
Correct the first time.
The defects the regulator is finding are almost all avoidable – warning labels, backup-circuit labels, RCD settings, tidy terminations. They cost little or nothing to get right on the day and are expensive to fix later.
A second set of eyes before handover.
Victoria proves the point: an independent check before the system goes live catches the small number of genuinely dangerous installs before they can do any harm.
But there’s another side to this.
Victoria’s inspection regime can also create a bottleneck. Xavier Waters made that point after my last post – he’s currently got five jobs waiting for inspections because his inspectors have been unavailable.
He raised an interesting question: do we need a physical inspection of every system, or can technology give us another way?
We already collect photographic evidence through the STC process.
What if we went further?
Geo- and time-stamped photos. Battery mounting and clearances. Switchboard protection. Labels. Cable terminations. Backup circuits. Serial numbers. Commissioning records.
A structured digital completion record showing what was actually installed before the job is closed.
It wouldn’t replace electrical certification or the need for independent physical audits. But it could provide another set of eyes without requiring another person to physically attend every site.
I think there’s something in that.
That’s what we’re focused on at Bagatelle Energy: getting the delivery side right.
We match battery, solar and EV work to appropriately accredited installers across a national network, with the project management and delivery discipline needed to put the right crew on the right job and get the work completed properly.
And I think the next step for our industry is stronger evidence-based quality assurance at handover — without necessarily creating the inspection bottlenecks Victoria is experiencing.
The technology to do it is increasingly already in our hands.
The inspection regime is only going to get tighter.
The retailers who get ahead of it now won’t feel the change.
If you’re moving battery volume and want the delivery side handled properly, I’d like to hear from you.