Wendy has lived in her five-unit apartment block in Waverton, on Sydney's lower north shore, for 15 years. Two of the units are owner-occupied, three are tenanted, and Wendy says the small group of owners communicates well and knows each other closely. Built in the 1970s, the building's solid brick construction gives it strong thermal mass, so with blinds and awnings, residents stay comfortable through most of the year without powered heating or cooling.
For Wendy, adding shared solar to the roof came down to more than the bills. She thinks about what she calls intergenerational justice: the idea that the environmental cost of one generation's choices falls on the next. As she puts it,
"I've been part of a generation that has been responsible for quite dramatic changes in the climate, and I feel it's important for me to acknowledge that and to do what I can in terms of intergenerational justice."
Other owners in the building weighed in for different reasons. For some, the cost savings mattered more than the environmental case – the project ended up serving both.
Wendy's apartment building in Waverton, NSW
Wendy first heard about Allume's SolShare technology through a webinar run by North Sydney Council. She and her neighbours had already looked into solar as individual owners and found it would be complicated and expensive to fit separate systems on their shared roof. The council's webinar introduced a different option: one shared system for the whole building.
With the NSW Solar for Apartment Residents (SoAR) grant covering 50% of the installation cost, the five owners found they could fit out the entire building for around what it would have cost just two of them to install individual systems. That made the case for everyone: owners, tenants and landlords all stood to benefit, and a shared system adds to the resale value of every unit in the block. Landlords, Wendy notes, can also use the improvement to justify higher rent, reflecting the value tenants get from the system.
The remaining half of the cost came from the building's strata capital works fund (the owners' corporation's reserve for major building costs), which the owners had managed carefully over the years. Their strata managers helped guide the owners' corporation through the approvals, the special resolution needed to apply for the SoAR grant, and the paperwork and communication with residents throughout.
Not every owner was convinced straight away. One landlord, who doesn't live in the building, raised concerns about how the panels would look on the roof. Another owner remained undecided about whether the numbers made sense for them.
Wendy took it on herself to do the homework, checking how much sunlight the roof would get, working out where the equipment would sit, and pulling together the full costs and benefits. She shared photographs with the landlord to ease his concerns about the panels' appearance, and sat down with the undecided owner to talk through the figures directly. Her approach was simple – come to the conversation informed, and neighbours are far more likely to agree. It worked, and the project went ahead with the support of the full owners' corporation.
Green.com.au carried out the installation. They're a solar installer based nearby in North Sydney and one of our certified SolShare installation partners. Wendy says the team visited the building beforehand, explained the process clearly and kept in close contact throughout, something she credits partly to the installer being local.
The crew completed the entire installation in two days, bringing everything they needed and causing minimal disruption to residents, several of whom were working from home at the time. Wendy describes them as cooperative and accommodating from start to finish. Once the system was live, she stayed in regular contact with our team, particularly Will, who she says answers every question quickly and always has the information she needs.
SolShare divides the building's solar generation across all five units, adjusting the split hourly so every household gets a fair share of the energy produced, whatever time they use power. Wendy checks the SolCentre dashboard, Allume's platform for tracking usage and system performance, most days to see how much solar is available. She's learned to shift heavier tasks like the dishwasher and, since installing a timer, her hot water heating, into the middle of the day when the sun is strongest.
The results have been significant for a household that already used relatively little power. Wendy's draw from the grid has dropped from an average of around 7 kilowatt-hours a day to under 2, with part of that saving coming from a more efficient fridge and the rest from solar. She now covers around 60 to 70% of her electricity use with solar, and one neighbour with a young baby found that shifting laundry to the middle of the day made a real difference to their bill.
Wendy expects the system to pay for itself in around five years once the grant, ongoing bill savings and the boost to the building's resale value are factored in. For her, it's also about backing a technology she believes will keep improving:
"I like to be an early adopter of things that I think are going to work in the future."