Solar and battery retailers operate under two parallel systems of consumer protection, and disputes usually start because one party confuses them. The manufacturer’s warranty is a voluntary promise with conditions written by the manufacturer. The consumer guarantees in the Australian Consumer Law (ACL) are statutory rights that exist regardless of what any warranty document says, cannot be excluded by contract, and frequently outlast the warranty period. McKercher Corporation has prepared this reference for its staff across Perth Solar Warehouse and PSW Energy, and for industry readers navigating the same questions. It covers what the law requires of retailers and manufacturers, what it does not require, and how the enforcement environment has changed in 2025 and 2026.
This article is general information, not legal advice. Specific disputes should be assessed on their facts, and businesses should check official guidance from the ACCC and WA Consumer Protection or seek legal advice before acting.
Key points
- Maximum penalties for breaches of the Competition and Consumer Act and key ACL provisions doubled to $100 million per contravention in March 2026, and governments agreed in November 2025 to introduce civil penalties for businesses that refuse to provide consumer guarantee remedies. The cost of getting this wrong is rising sharply.
- Consumer guarantees apply automatically to goods and services up to $100,000, and to dearer goods bought for personal or household use. Effectively every residential solar and battery system is covered.
- The retailer who took the customer's money is the front line for product faults. Sending a customer to the manufacturer is not a compliant response, and the ACCC received more than 3,000 reports of exactly that conduct in 2025.
- A retailer who remedies a manufacturing fault can recover its costs from the manufacturer under section 274 of the ACL, with three years to claim. The indemnity cannot be excluded by contract.
- The law also has limits. There is no remedy for change of mind, misuse, damage from third-party work, defects disclosed before sale, or claims for consequential loss that was not reasonably foreseeable. For failures that are not major, the business, not the customer, chooses between repair, replacement and refund.
Two systems of protection, one common confusion
A residential solar and battery installation typically carries several documents: a product warranty on the panels, a separate product and performance warranty on the inverter and battery, a workmanship warranty from the installer, and sometimes a voluntary extended warranty. All of these are express warranties. They are promises the businesses chose to make, on the conditions they chose to set.
Sitting underneath all of them are the consumer guarantees in the ACL. For goods, the guarantees most relevant to solar and battery hardware are that goods must be of acceptable quality (section 54), which includes being safe, durable and free from defects; fit for any purpose the customer made known (section 55); matching their description (section 56); and that express warranties must be honoured (section 59). For installation work, services must be provided with due care and skill (section 60), be fit for the purpose made known (section 61), and be supplied within a reasonable time (section 62).
Three points follow that every salesperson and service coordinator should be able to recite.
First, the guarantees cannot be excluded, restricted or modified. Section 64 of the ACL voids any contract term that attempts it. No warranty wording, terms-and-conditions clause or signed acknowledgment removes them.
Second, the guarantees can outlast the warranty. Acceptable quality includes reasonable durability, and what is reasonable depends on the product, its price and how it was marketed. The ACCC has stated publicly that consumer guarantee rights may continue to apply after a manufacturer’s warranty has expired. A premium inverter that fails at year six of a five-year warranty may still attract a remedy; a tribunal would ask what a reasonable consumer paying that price would expect.
Third, statements made in selling create express warranties. If a brochure or a salesperson says a battery has a 15-year design life, the customer can reasonably treat that as a promise, even if the written warranty says 10. Sales teams should describe warranty periods accurately and avoid lifespan claims that exceed the documented warranty unless the business intends to stand behind them.
Major failure versus minor failure: who chooses the remedy
When a product fails to meet a guarantee, the ACL splits remedies by severity, and the split determines who holds the choice.
A failure is major when a reasonable consumer would not have bought the product had they known of the problem, when the product is substantially unfit for purpose and cannot easily be fixed within a reasonable time, when it departs significantly from its description or sample, or when it is unsafe. For a major failure the customer chooses the remedy: a refund, a replacement, or compensation for the drop in value. The business cannot insist on repair.
For a failure that is not major, the business chooses. It may repair, replace or refund at its option, provided it does so within a reasonable time. A single repairable inverter fault, promptly fixed, is the textbook minor failure. Repeated failures are different: a series of faults that individually look minor can amount to a major failure when taken together, because a reasonable consumer would not have bought a system that keeps breaking down.
Two cost rules attach to remedies. Where goods cannot be returned without significant cost, and roof-mounted panels and wall-mounted batteries are the standard examples, the supplier must collect or remedy them at its own expense. ACCC guidance lists fixed and installed goods in exactly this category. Charging a customer labour to remove a panel that failed under guarantee is not compliant. And where a guarantee failure causes loss that was reasonably foreseeable, such as lost generation during an extended outage caused by a defective component, the customer can claim compensation for that consequential loss in addition to the remedy.
The retailer is the front line, and the manufacturer must indemnify
The most common compliance failure in the solar industry is the referral. A customer reports a faulty battery and is told to ring the manufacturer because “it’s a manufacturer warranty issue”. Under the ACL this is wrong in both directions.
The customer’s contract is with the retailer who sold the system. Both the supplier and the manufacturer are responsible for the acceptable quality of goods, and the customer may pursue either. A retailer cannot redirect the customer to the manufacturer and treat the matter as closed, and telling a customer they may only deal with the manufacturer risks being misleading or deceptive conduct. The ACCC has taken enforcement action repeatedly on this point: Mazda Australia paid an $11.5 million penalty over misrepresentations about refund and replacement rights, and Fitbit paid $11 million for misrepresenting consumer guarantee rights. Telling a customer the warranty document is the limit of their rights sits in the same category of conduct.
The law balances this burden through section 274. Where a retailer provides a remedy for a failure that is attributable to the manufacturer, the manufacturer must indemnify the retailer for the liability, including the cost of the goods and reasonably foreseeable amounts such as diagnosis and reinstallation labour. The indemnity cannot be contracted away, and the retailer has three years to claim, running from when it paid out or proceedings began. Retailers absorbing warranty service costs on failed hardware should be invoicing manufacturers, or importers where the manufacturer has no Australian presence, as a matter of routine. Where a manufacturer becomes insolvent or exits the market, the retailer remains responsible to the customer, which is a commercial reason to be selective about hardware partners quite apart from the engineering ones.
The installation itself is treated separately. Defective workmanship is a services guarantee matter under sections 60 to 62, and responsibility sits with the business the customer paid, regardless of any subcontracting arrangement.
Warranty documents must carry the mandatory text
Any written warranty against defects supplied with consumer goods must comply with regulation 90 of the Competition and Consumer Regulations 2010. It must be transparent, state what the warrantor will do and what the consumer must do to claim, identify the warrantor with contact details, state the warranty period and who bears claim costs, and reproduce the mandatory text word for word:
“Our goods come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law. You are entitled to a replacement or refund for a major failure and compensation for any other reasonably foreseeable loss or damage. You are also entitled to have the goods repaired or replaced if the goods fail to be of acceptable quality and the failure does not amount to a major failure.”
Warranty conditions also cannot impose hurdles that conflict with the guarantees. A customer reporting a fault needs to describe the problem, visible damage and any error codes. A business cannot require photographs, paid call-out fees, diagnostic purchases or extended helpline processes as preconditions to providing a remedy, although customers who can run simple checks often shorten the resolution time by doing so.
Where businesses can legitimately push back
Consumer guarantees are strong, but they are not unlimited, and a business that knows the boundaries can decline unfounded claims with confidence. The ACL provides no remedy in the following situations.
Change of mind. The guarantees address failures, not regret. A customer who decides after installation that they wanted a bigger battery, a different brand or no system at all has no statutory right to a refund. Any cooling-off rights come from the contract or, for unsolicited sales, the specific ACL provisions governing them.
Misuse and abnormal use. Damage caused by the customer’s own conduct is excluded. A battery enclosure modified by the homeowner, panels scoured with abrasive cleaning equipment, or an inverter damaged by an unauthorised electrical alteration are not guarantee failures. The distinction that matters is causation: customer conduct that did not harm the product, such as sensible self-cleaning of panels or monitoring resets, does not void anything, and refusing service on that basis would itself breach the ACL.
Damage from third-party work. Where a fault arises because another contractor’s work damaged the system, the guarantee claim against the original supplier fails on causation. The customer’s remedy lies against the party that caused the damage. Note the limit: the mere fact that a third party serviced or repaired a system does not extinguish guarantees on components they did not touch.
Defects disclosed before sale. Where a specific defect was drawn to the customer’s attention before purchase, the acceptable quality guarantee does not apply to that defect. It continues to apply to everything undisclosed.
Choice of remedy for non-major failures. Customers frequently demand an immediate refund for a first, repairable fault. For a failure that is not major, the choice of remedy belongs to the business. Offering a prompt repair is lawful and usually the right commercial answer, with the caveat that the repair must happen within a reasonable time and repeated failures change the analysis.
Durability proportionate to price and product. Reasonable durability is not infinite durability. A budget component that fails shortly after a long service life would not necessarily entitle the customer to a remedy; the question is always what a reasonable consumer would expect for that product at that price. Premium pricing raises the bar, which is worth remembering in both directions: it limits exposure on entry-level hardware and increases it on flagship products.
Consequential loss has limits. Compensation extends to reasonably foreseeable loss, not to every inconvenience claimed. Lost solar generation during an unreasonable repair delay is foreseeable. Speculative or remote losses are not, and customers also bear a general obligation not to inflate avoidable losses.
Business purchases outside the threshold. Goods over $100,000 acquired for commercial use, or goods acquired for resupply or to be transformed in production, fall outside the consumer guarantee regime. Most commercial rooftop systems under $100,000 remain covered, a point PSW Energy quoting teams should keep in view rather than assume away.
One caution belongs alongside this list. Pushing back on a claim is legitimate; misrepresenting rights is not. The line is crossed the moment a staff member states or implies that the warranty document defines the customer’s rights, that guarantees expired with the warranty period when durability says otherwise, or that the manufacturer is the only avenue. With AI tools in every customer’s pocket, claimants now arrive citing section numbers. Staff responses must be at least as accurate.
The 2026 enforcement environment
The compliance stakes have moved materially in the past 18 months.
In November 2025, Commonwealth, state and territory consumer affairs ministers agreed to reforms making it unlawful to fail to provide a remedy where the consumer guarantees require one, backed by civil penalties and infringement notices, with the decision regulation impact statement published in December 2025. Once legislated, the change converts remedy refusal from a private dispute into conduct a regulator can prosecute directly. Manufacturers who fail to honour the section 274 indemnity are within the same reform’s scope.
In March 2026, Parliament passed legislation doubling maximum penalties under the Competition and Consumer Act, lifting the fixed corporate maximum from $50 million to $100 million per contravention for the conduct provisions, including misleading or deceptive conduct and unfair contract terms. Separately, an unfair trading practices prohibition is before the Senate, with committee reporting due mid-June 2026.
The ACCC has also named consumer guarantee compliance a continuing 2025-26 enforcement priority and reported more than 3,000 consumer contacts in 2025 about businesses denying remedies or redirecting customers to manufacturers. Solar retailers should assume the sector’s complaint volumes are visible to regulators.
Industry codes add a contractual layer. As a NETCC Approved Seller, a business commits to honouring all guarantees and warranties, making repairs and replacements promptly, and operating a fair, documented complaints process with acknowledgment, a complaints register and escalation paths. NETCC accreditation, alongside Solar Accreditation Australia accreditation, is also an entry condition for approved vendors under the WA Residential Battery Scheme, and WA Consumer Protection has positioned ACL compliance as a baseline expectation for participating retailers and installers. A consumer guarantee failure mishandled badly enough can therefore cascade into NETCC sanctions and scheme eligibility consequences, not just a single remedy cost.
Handling a warranty dispute: the working sequence
For staff facing a guarantee claim, the sequence that keeps the business compliant and the dispute contained looks like this.
First, characterise the failure: product fault, installation fault, customer-caused damage or third-party damage. The categorisation determines who is responsible and what remedy applies, so it should rest on a technician’s assessment, not a phone diagnosis.
Second, classify severity honestly. If the failure is major or safety-related, the customer chooses the remedy. If it is not major, offer the repair or replacement promptly and record the reasonable-time clock.
Third, never refer the customer away. Coordinate the manufacturer claim on the customer’s behalf, then recover costs under section 274 within the three-year window.
Fourth, document everything: the reported fault, the assessment, the remedy offered, dates and the customer’s responses. If the dispute escalates in Western Australia, the customer’s path runs through WA Consumer Protection conciliation and then the Magistrates Court, where claims up to $10,000 proceed as minor cases generally without legal representation, and claims up to $75,000 within the court’s general civil jurisdiction. A well-documented file decides most of these matters before they get there.
The obligations are demanding, but they are symmetrical. The same law that makes the retailer the front line gives it full cost recovery from manufacturers, the choice of remedy for minor failures, and clear grounds to decline claims based on misuse, third-party damage or change of mind. Knowing both halves is the point of this reference.
