Putting solar on a period home

By Oliver Hill

The roof is the first question, not the panels

Housing through these suburbs runs from Victorian and Edwardian homes to interwar bungalows and larger period villas, many of them renovated. The panels available to you are the same ones available to a new house in the outer west. What differs is what they are being fixed to.

Roof material, and why condition matters more

Terracotta tile is common on period housing here, and slate turns up on some older and higher-end homes. Both can be worked with. Both are worth having looked at first.

The question is not really the material, it is the remaining life. Panels stay on a roof for decades. If the covering is likely to need replacing within a few years, the panels come off and go back on at your expense, and that cost is entirely avoidable by sequencing the two jobs in the right order. If you are thinking about re-roofing at some point anyway, do it first.

Slate specifically needs someone who has worked on it before. It is not a reason to avoid solar, but it is a reason to ask an installer directly what experience they have with it.

Complex rooflines eat usable space

Period roofs carry hips, gables and decorative forms that a modern roof does not, and chimneys sit where they sit. Each interruption breaks up the continuous area a run of panels needs. The practical effect is that the usable area can be well short of the total, and the layout matters more than on a simple roof.

The extension is often your best roof

This is the useful one. A lot of homes in Aberfeldie, Strathmore and the surrounding streets have had rear extensions added, and that newer section is frequently the best solar roof on the property: simpler geometry, a newer covering, and often a better orientation than the original house. If your home has been extended, expect the design conversation to centre on the back of the house rather than the front.

It also sidesteps the street-facing question entirely, which can matter where neighbourhood character is a consideration.

Mature trees

Established trees are part of why people live in these streets, and they shade some properties at some times of day. Shading is not all or nothing: a tree that clears the roof at noon may cut across it late in the afternoon. A designer should be looking at the whole day rather than the moment they happened to be standing there.

Older switchboards

Boards on older homes sometimes need upgrading before a system can be connected. This is a genuine cost and a genuine requirement, not an upsell, but it should appear as its own line on a quote rather than disappearing into a total. If two quotes differ by roughly the cost of a board upgrade, check whether one of them has simply left it out.

Heritage and neighbourhood character

Parts of these suburbs sit within heritage precincts. That does not mean your house is affected: overlays apply to particular properties and particular streets rather than to whole suburbs, and plenty of homes in a suburb with heritage areas carry no overlay at all.

Where one does apply it usually affects what is visible from the street rather than whether you can have solar. Check your own address with the council rather than assuming either way.

If the house has already been renovated

Substantially renovated period homes have often had the switchboard brought up to date already, and some already have solar, a battery or an EV charger. That changes the job: you may be adding to what is there rather than starting from nothing, and the right answer may be a smaller addition than a new installation would be.

Adding a battery later

If the house already has panels, adding storage is its own decision with its own constraints, and the existing inverter has a lot to say about it. Adding a battery to solar you already have covers what makes a retrofit straightforward and what complicates it.

Victorian solar rebates explained is worth reading first if you are adding storage to existing panels, because the rebates do not work the way most people assume.

Homes around Niddrie, Airport West and Ascot Vale share much of this, though the post-war housing north of the area tends to have simpler roofs and more of it.

Common questions