Reposit's No Bill product guarantees a household doesn't see, or pay an electricity bill for as long as they stay on No Bill. For most people that starts at seven years and continues on from there.

But No Bill is not for everyone. There are some people who the product is not a good fit for because of the decisions we made during the design of the product. Here we have a good look at the top five problems that make No Bill a poor fit for some people.

1. Reposit has full control of your solar and battery system

2. You cannot bring your own solar and battery

3. Reposit chooses the size and brand of your solar and battery system

4. A No Bill system is rarely the cheapest solar and battery system you can buy

5. You cannot use unlimited electricity

Problem: Reposit has full control of your solar and battery system

Reposit needs 100% control of your solar and battery system if you are on our No Bill product. That means that there can be nobody else giving charge/discharge or generate/don't generate instructions to your equipment. This includes EV chargers, hot water systems, a Home Assistant installation, the electricity network, and anybody else.

From time to time (and increasingly often) your system will need to respond to electricity network and/or market operator signals. Where this happens Reposit accepts those signals, processes them for the best action to take, and then commands your solar and battery system. Responding correctly to these signals means preferential access to grid capacity, and so getting this right is an important part of making the most of the grid connection at your house.

If you are interested in sending control signals to your battery and solar for any reason whatsoever, then Reposit No Bill is not for you. It is not possible to temporarily override our control. And because you are not exposed to an electricity bill, there is no benefit to you in overriding our control at any time.

Why?

Reposit No Bill is only possible because we are constantly trading electricity using your solar and battery system to create economic value.

We do this by looking for every opportunity to "buy" electricity at some cost, and "sell" it for a benefit that is higher than the cost we "bought" it at. In the electricity system you "buy" and "sell" by making electricity pass through various measuring devices. The electricity meter in your home is one type of measuring device - there are others inside the Reposit controller. 

We need to know with 100% certainty that the energy we bought is going to be there when it comes time to "sell". If we can't be sure of that, we will not "buy" the energy, and we will not be able to generate economic value from trading. If we allow a third-party to control your system then we cannot be sure that the energy will be there, because they may have taken it. And so we take, and make sure we have, 100% control of your solar and battery while you are on the No Bill product.

If you leave No Bill (which you are free to do at any time without penalty) then we turn off our control, and your solar and battery system will revert to its in-built "fill from solar, discharge later on" type behaviour. We will also provide you with a link to the apps and user manuals for your system and you are free to control it however you please. If you leave No Bill you will resume receiving, and need to pay your electricity bills.

Problem: You cannot bring your own solar and battery. You must buy your solar and battery system from Reposit

To be on Reposit No Bill you need to have bought a No Bill solar and battery system from Reposit. That means that you can't use any solar or batteries that you already have, and you can't buy your solar and batteries from anybody other than Reposit.

If you have existing solar, we will remove and recycle it. This is usually fine for people with solar systems of 5kW or less, but is generally problematic for people with larger systems.

If you have an existing battery, we will also remove and recycle it. This is generally problematic for most people with a battery.

In some cases your existing system will be doing a good enough job to keep your bills down. But where they are not then removing them is the right thing to do. Reposit will not provide you with a design or quote where we think that it isn't in your interest to replace your existing equipment with a No Bill system.

Why? 

No Bill works commercially because we are constantly trading electricity using your solar and battery system to create economic value.

This only works if we can rely on the solar and battery at your home to perform as expected, all the time, and without the interference of third parties. Solar systems and batteries that did not come from Reposit are problematic for us because:

• They are either untested by our Product Engineers, or have been tested and found to be poorly performing in reliability, controllability, performance, weather resistance, or other things we look for when selecting products
• Our controller doesn't know how to communicate with the device, the software version on the device, or the particular interface the device makes available to Reposit
• They are often being remotely managed or controlled by the manufacturer or some other party over your Internet connection, and that third-party could interfere with our electricity trading
• It is too difficult and expensive to determine if they have been installed to a standard that we consider acceptable to take trading risk on. More than 10 years of data has shown us that most systems are installed poorly and/or do not work properly
• They are not large enough for us to create enough economic value to make your electricity bill our problem
• Older systems become increasingly difficult to add capacity to. Solar and battery technology moves quickly and equipment manufacturers move to new designs and stop producing upgrades for old designs. This means that a totally new system must be installed. The new and the old system rarely work well together and all sorts of problems typically emerge
• Electrical, solar, battery and grid standards change quite often. It is the responsibility of the last installer to work on a site to make sure the site is compliant with the standards. Most installers will avoid existing equipment and promise support for the equipment they installed. This doesn't work for No Bill because we will always need to replace the inverter so that we can talk to it for trading. As soon as we do that, we have have to upgrade the whole site to the current standards - which is almost never cost-effective.

In the past we did allow people to add Reposit Controllers to their systems and tried to deliver a good customer experience. We found that for all the reasons above it was too difficult to accommodate existing solar and battery systems. Reposit is able to add capacity to No Bill systems no matter how old they are because the Reposit Controller acts like a glue between different evolutions of No Bill equipment.

Problem: Reposit chooses the size and brand of your solar and battery system

Reposit designs a No Bill solar and battery system for your home during the sales process. You are free to ask for a larger system, and we will expand it where we have space to do so. But you cannot make it smaller than our design, and you cannot choose the brands of your equipment.

This makes No Bill a poor fit for somebody who has looked at all the brands of the various pieces of a solar and battery system, and made a firm decision that they want a particular brand for one reason or another. Likewise, No Bill is a poor fit for a person who has decided they need a specific sized solar and battery system for one reason or another. That complete flexibility does not exist within the Reposit No Bill product.

Why?

Reposit designs No Bill systems that allow us to take the financial risk of your entire electricity bill for the next seven years. Some things we take into account are:

• How much energy you currently use in each month of the year
• How much energy your solar will generate, and how that will fall as your system ages
• How much energy your system will store, and how that will fall as your system ages
• How much generation, storage and consumption we have available from our other No Bill customers
• What regulatory changes are locked-in for introduction, and what regulatory changes are likely to be introduced in the next 7 years
• What the electricity market conditions are likely to be for your particular grid connection over the next 7 years
• What your stated electrification plans are (cars, hot water, space heating, home extension, etc) 
• What climatic conditions you live in, and how those will change over the next 7 years
• Where you can place equipment at your home, and the physical consequences of those locations

Reposit has data for thousands of solar and battery systems, operating for over 10 years, in all parts of Australia. We have control and visibility of many different brands of solar panels, inverters and batteries and we receive and process realtime data from them all. We know how different types of equipment perform in different conditions, and over different time periods. This knowledge lets us deliver the No Bill product.

We are so confident in our solar and battery system designs that we are willing to take on your entire electricity bill, and all of the system maintenance for seven years. If instead you would like to have responsibility for your bill and system maintenance, then Reposit No Bill isn't for you.

Problem: A No Bill system is rarely the cheapest solar and battery system you can buy

A No Bill system is not going to be the cheapest system you will get a quote on. Instead, it will be priced at the upper-mid range of solar and battery systems in the market. It is also likely to have more solar and battery storage than your lowest quote.

A Reposit No Bill system is not the best option for a person who are looking to buy a solar and battery system for the least amount of money.

Why?

No Bill systems are designed to guarantee financial returns to a buyer, not to be the lowest cost option.

By taking your bill from you, we are removing all of your downside risk. We take on the risk of:

• All your of your usage
• All consumption price changes (historically prices rise)
• All solar feed-in tariff changes (historically feed-in tariffs fall)
• The impact of regulatory changes on your use of the grid
• All costs to keep your solar and battery system operating properly
• All of the cost of mobile phone network communications to your system
• All metering charges over the No Bill period
• All costs involved in keeping your system compliant with grid rules
• All costs in connecting a new solar and battery system to the grid
• All costs in obtaining the various subsidies available

You only pay for the No Bill system, and any interest on that system if you choose to finance it with one of our financing partners. We build some of the above cost into the purchase price, but not enough to come anywhere near to covering the full cost of the above risks over seven years. 

Instead we manage those risks with our Reposit Controller and the technology and team that supports it. The controller installation at your house, and the systems and people the manage it also add cost. Some of these costs are also built into the purchase price. But without the Reposit controller we would not be able to effectively manage the risks above, and there would not be a No Bill product.

We also offset some these costs by choosing reliable, high-quality, performant, no-frills equipment with strong warranties. We don't need the equipment to be smart, we add the smarts. And we don't value brand or the brand marketing/installer wooing investments behind them. We just need equipment that is solid, responsive, reliable and well-priced at volume.

By removing all downside risk, and striking a balance on system cost, we are able to guarantee No Bill customers excellent payback periods. There is no other product on the market that will guarantee a quoted payback period. 

Problem: You cannot use unlimited electricity. There is a fair use policy that is tracked and enforced

You will never get an electricity bill when you are a Reposit No Bill customer. Even if you use an insane amount of electricity, we will not send you a bill for it. But it is likely you will have exceeded your "Fair Use Cap".

Your Fair Use Cap is set to 120% of the electricity usage you had just before you joined the product. That is, Reposit says fair use is 20% more electricity than what you are currently using unless you tell us that you have plans to use a lot more electricity very soon. In that case, we do the maths to set your Fair Use Cap to 20% more than what you think you are going to use in any particular month.

We set the cap to be a different amount for each month because we know that some houses use more electricity in different seasons depending on where they are. Typically we allow for higher usage in Winter and Summer, and less usage in the more mild months.

We know that people will use more electricity once know they aren't getting bills anymore, and we design for that. But there is a limit to the increase in usage we can support, and we call that the Fair Use Cap.

There are lots of reasons why people exceed their Fair Use Cap. Most of them are not deliberate and we work with people to resolve the issue. Some customers choose to ignore the Fair Use Cap month after month, and those customers are transitioned off the No Bill product. Information on this can be found in the "What happens if I go over the Fair Use Cap" FAQ answer.

No Bill is not a good product for a person who assumes that having no electricity bill means unlimited energy usage. This is not true, and these people are removed from the No Bill product once we decide that they are not able to stay within the terms of the No Bill product.

Why?

Reposit No Bill works because we share energy around between our customers. When we get a new customer we take on their consumption, but we also get to use their generation and their storage. When we design a system for a new customer, we take into account what we have available to us from other customers in our existing No Bill fleet. We have certainty on solar generation, and storage capacity, and the Fair Use Cap gives us some certainty on consumption in the customer base. Without that kind of certainty we can't deliver the No Bill product as a commercial proposition.

We do everything we can to keep customers on No Bill because the more consumption, generation and storage we manage, the better the trades we can make. We make sure that we can remove customers that don't respect the terms they signed up to. In that way we can ensure that the vast majority of customers that do respect the terms of the No Bill product continue to benefit from it.

Bonus Problem: Your No Bill Guarantee will end if Reposit goes out of business

(If you have read this far, you have probably realised that Reposit has spent a lot of time getting things right over the 12 years we have been in business. We've seen a lot, done a lot, and been approached by investors a lot. But people are right to ask about the longevity of any business they are buying a high-value item from, and so here's the answer...)

If Reposit ceases to operate we will not be able to pay your electricity costs, and you will get your bills back. Your solar and battery system will return to operating as a standard "fill from solar, discharge later on" solar and battery system, which you can then control/have controlled however you would like.

Reposit doesn't own any part of your solar and battery system other than our control software and controller design. Reposit doesn't need to exist for the solar and battery system you bought to operate.

In effect, if Reposit were to go out of business, everyone would be removed from the No Bill product and the same processes of returning the solar and battery system to "dumb" control, and bills to our customers would execute. Your equipment warranties would still be honoured by the manufacturers under the usual Australian consumer laws for durables.

Reposit is the oldest residential battery company in Australia, with thousands of customers and plenty of presence in the electricity industry. A lot would need to go wrong for Reposit's business to cease operating, but just like any business, it could happen.