In this article
This page was written on the last day of 2025 and picked five products it thought would redraw residential solar. Eight months is long enough to mark the paper. Two of the five are on Perth roofs now. One is still not something you can buy in Australia. And one belongs to a company a Singapore court placed under judicial management in May.
Product and specification updates
- Tesla's Powerwall 3 and Sigenergy's SigenStor were the right two calls. Both are in our range, and both carry Australian numbers that differ from the ones first published here.
- The 11.5 kW output quoted for the Powerwall 3 came off the US datasheet. Our own product page rates it up to 10 kW here. The 20 kW of DC solar input, 13.5 kWh of storage and 185 A motor-start rating were right.
- The Sigen EV DC module no longer ships at 25 kW. Since 9 June 2026 every unit leaves the factory set to 12.5 kW, and 25 kW is a paid software licence.
- Sigenergy's battery modules have moved on too. The 5.38 and 8.06 kWh modules described here have been superseded in Australia by a 9 kWh module.
- The two we would not write again are Maxeon and Enphase — neither is in our range, and both sections have dated badly for different reasons.
Continuous battery output
The strongest argument in the original piece was that home batteries had stopped being judged on kilowatt-hours alone. That has held up. A battery's continuous kilowatt rating is what decides whether the house feels normal in a blackout, whether the ducted air conditioner can start on stored energy, and whether an EV charging at the same time as the oven forces a choice.
| Tesla home battery, continuous AC output | Rated |
|---|---|
| Powerwall 2, the previous platform, now legacy | 5 kW |
| Powerwall 3, as we list it | 10 kW |
That is the shift in one line. Everything else about the Powerwall 3 argument — three MPPTs, 20 kW of DC solar straight into the unit, a 185 A locked-rotor rating for motor inrush, LFP chemistry rather than any new chemistry — was reported accurately and still is.
The Sigenergy correction
The original section described a bidirectional EV DC charging module "available in 12 kW or 25 kW". That is no longer how it is sold here. Sigenergy ended marketing of the 25 kW models for Australia and New Zealand on 9 June 2026 under product change notice EOM2026001. The module continues, factory-set to 12.5 kW, and the second half of its output is now a software licence bought through the mySigen app. Existing 25 kW units keep running at 25 kW. Older 12.5 kW units cannot take the licence. We wrote that change up in detail in what changed on 9 June.
The battery half has moved as well. The 5.38 and 8.06 kWh modules quoted in the original are the earlier generation; the module we stock now is the 9 kWh Sigen Battery, and the energy controller spans 3 to 29.9 kW across single- and three-phase supplies. The architecture argument was the durable part and it survives intact: one stack holding the solar inverter, the battery converter and the EV charging, with fewer conversion stages between them. That is still the most interesting thing on our shelf, and the Sigenergy page covers how the pieces fit.
Perovskite availability outlook for 2027
Oxford PV's perovskite-on-silicon tandem modules are real, and the physics is not marketing: stacking a perovskite absorber on silicon captures a wider slice of the spectrum, which is how a module gets past the practical ceiling of silicon alone. The 24.5 per cent module and the 26.9 per cent record quoted here were accurate.
What the original understated is the distance between "commercially available" and "available to you". Residential volumes remain pilot scale, large-scale manufacturing is expected from 2027, and we have found no Clean Energy Council module listing for the Centaur family — which is what an Australian rooftop install needs before it can claim certificates. Interesting technology, correctly identified. Not a 2026 purchase in Perth.
Reassessing Maxeon and Enphase
The Maxeon 7 section reads worst. The panel and its back-contact cells were never in question; the company behind the 40-year warranty is. The Singapore High Court placed Maxeon Solar Technologies and its Singapore subsidiary under interim judicial management on 9 April 2026, and ordered full judicial management on 29 May 2026, appointing Deloitte's Tan Wei Cheong and Lim Loo Khoon as judicial managers. Maxeon reported both orders in its own filings. None of that says the panels stop working. It does mean a four-decade warranty now sits with a company in a court-supervised restructuring, which is exactly the risk a warranty is bought to avoid.
The Enphase section has aged more gently and is still wrong for a buyer. The IQ8 microinverter and its grid-forming behaviour were described correctly, and the caveats about needing the system controller and battery to make it work were fair. It is simply no longer the current product here: Enphase launched the gallium-nitride IQ9N in Australia and New Zealand on 13 July 2026. Microinverters are also not part of what we design — our systems are string and hybrid — so the section was background dressed as a recommendation.
System design priorities
The three priorities the original ended on are the right ones, and none of them are about a hero product. Get the most out of a limited roof. Make sure the house behaves in an outage. Plan for the EV before it arrives, not after. All three are design questions, and they are decided by how the parts are matched to the load, the phase and the switchboard — not by which brand won a headline in December.
The batteries we actually install are on the battery range, and the panels on the solar range. If you want the three priorities worked through against your address, ask for a written price and tell us what you drive and when you use power.