What are the best ways to get off gas? Ask the Tesla-driving sparkie

Brendan Lang is an electrician from Melbourne who swapped his diesel guzzling, tradie ute for a Tesla, and calls his business Get off Gas.

This week he answers some common questions about household electrification.

INDUCTION STOVES VS GAS STOVES

Why should we replace our gas stove with an induction stove?

There are so many great reasons to swap over from gas to induction. The health benefits are well documented around childhood asthma. Cooking on gas stoves is associated with asthma cases. [Scientists have found that around 12 per cent of childhood asthma in Australia can be attributed to the use of gas stoves.]

The next big thing is the ease of cooking – cooking on induction is just so simple. You can set the setting to 7 or 8 if it requires a medium to high heat – you don’t have to look at a gas flame to gauge whether it’s a medium to high flame.

You also get a nice clean workspace to work on. You don’t have to pull the whole stove apart and put it in the dishwasher and clean it after every meal. And you also get a bit of extra bench space to work with so you can use that bench when you’re not cooking – you can chop veggies and do different things on it.

Safety is another huge aspect of an induction cooktop. I actually had an instance this week where an old electric cooktop was being replaced with an induction stove, and we put a few things on top of the old cooktop, then bumped the dial accidentally and the paper that was sitting on top of the cooktop started to burn.

That simply wouldn’t happen with induction. Gas has the same problem. Induction is so safe because it doesn’t actually generate any heat until there is a pot sitting on top of it that is magnetic and will receive the induction from the magnets inside the cooktop. So incredibly safe from that perspective as well.

Doesn’t an induction cooktop use lots of power, and doesn’t that mean it will cost more to run?

It does use a bit of power. The maximum power is probably what most people look at when they look at the spec sheet on their cooktop. It’s likely to say 7000 watts, which is quite a lot.

But induction stoves don’t use a high amount of power for a long time, so when one of the elements of an induction stove is on its boost function, it might be using 3000 watts, which is only a bit more than what your toaster might use and it uses it for a really short period of time.

It’s also got a lot fewer losses than a gas cooktop. A lot of heat escapes from a gas flame that licks around the side of the pot. An induction cooktop doesn’t have that so it’s far more efficient at transferring electrical energy into heat energy to cook your food. It’s so much more efficient, so even though it’s using a higher amount of power, it’s using it more efficiently than a gas stove.

Do I need to rewire my house to install an induction stove?

In most cases no you don’t.

Most homes have a suitable power supply for an induction cooktop. You just need to make sure that you get your electrician out before you purchase your appliance. Some big, 90 centimetre, freestanding induction cooktops can use a fair bit of power so you want to really ensure that your existing supply is suitable for the appliance you plan to put in.

My old-style electric oven uses a lot of power just when electricity is really expensive and I want to use it in the evenings. What should I do to reduce this?

An electric oven has little seals around the door, so that’s where the heat can leak out, which means the oven may never reach temperature to turn off the thermostat. So first, check the seals.

You can often just order new seals online. You need to look up the model number, which is on a little sticker inside the door, to get the seals replaced. Sealing the oven door properly will enable to the thermostat to switch off when it reaches temperature, and not continually pump heat out into the kitchen and the rest of the house.

THE ELECTRIFICATION JOURNEY

What are the key appliances that I should electrify, and should I start with heating and cooling systems, hot water, or cooking?

It depends on your situation. If you’re heading into winter and your heating system is getting quite old, the chance of it breaking down is obviously more critical and you will need to address that first.

Hot water is a big issue to consider, because when your hot water system dies, you don’t want to have to be rushing around looking for a replacement. No one wants to be having cold showers, particularly in Victoria, any time of year. But in the winter it’s especially nasty.

If you want to be proactive with your hot water find out what systems will be suitable to replace your existing instantaneous gas system. Get some quotes, find out what rebates are applicable to you, and come up with a plan of action before your hot water system breaks down.

You’ll see a little sticker on the side of your existing hot water system which might have a date on it, which is when it was manufactured. If it’s over 15 years old, I would recommend starting to proactively look at replacing your hot water system so you don’t get caught without hot water.

You mentioned government rebates, which are available in different states for different appliances. But are the government rebates only for cheap, poor-quality products?

No, they’re also applicable to high quality products. The way the rebate systems work is the manufacturer applies to be approved for a particular rebate, and they then go on the approved product list.

All comers can be on the list, so long as their products are assessed and approved by the regulatory body. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are high quality products. It just means that they meet the expectations of the rebate scheme, and those expectations may not be as high as what you think they are.

You need to ensure you’re getting good advice from your installer regarding the quality of the product, be it a plumber or an air conditioning contractor or an electrician.

How do I navigate the rebates to ensure that I’m getting the most out of them?

This is a really important part of the process because when you access some of these rebates, you can only get them once for your home. You don’t want to find out in a couple of years that you haven’t made the most of it, because you can’t dip into that rebate scheme again.

You need to check that the quotes you’re getting from different suppliers state the model number of the appliance they’ll be using. That way you can compare apples with apples, and you can see that the rebate amounts also match.

There might be slight differences between contractors because some businesses will have different admin costs for processing those rebates. It’s usually around 50 or 100 bucks difference. Don’t be alarmed by that. Just go back to your contractor who’s given you the quote, and ask them to talk you through the rebate and how it comes to be that figure, so you have a better understanding of it.

If I can only afford to get rid of one of my gas appliances, which one should it be?

Definitely hot water, because that is something that you will use every day, and you can never get away from that usage. So you’ll always be heating up a couple of 100 litres of hot water a day, depending on how many people are living in your house, perhaps more.

Whereas your gas heating is only going to be for a portion of the year. Your gas cooktop only uses a low amount of gas. However, it has got the highest health consequences because of the open gas flame inside your house.

From a financial perspective, it’ll also be your hot water. A heat pump hot water system is three and a half times more efficient than a gas hot water system, so that’s where you can see your best bang for buck on your energy bill.

Should I insulate my home before I get rid of the gas and electrify everything?

It’s an interesting question. If you’re heading into winter, I would say, yes get that insulation in but make sure that when your electrician or your air conditioning contractors are up in the roof, that they’re well aware that they need to put all the insulation bats back in place.

If there’s any little back corners of the ceiling that they’ll be working on, they need to be conscious of not disturbing the insulation layer. It’s imperative to ensure the insulation is continuous throughout the roof – even small holes can really undo a lot of good work.

Similarly, if we’re not coming into winter, it’s probably a good idea to wait to do your insulation until all the electrical cabling and ductwork can be finished in the roof. It also means that the electrician can give the insulation contractor a certificate of electrical safety, which says it’s safe to go up into the roof. That’s a really important step before insulation installs happen.

We learnt that lesson during the pink batts saga, when people had their sons taken from them after they climbed into roofs that weren’t electrically safe. Now it’s a requirement that electrical safety certificates are issued before insulation contractors can access a roof.

3-PHASE POWER

What is 3-phase power as opposed to single-phase power?

3-phase power is when you have three active cables coming into your home. So a standard sort of home installation has single-phase power, which gets a neutral cable and an active cable.

A 3-phase installation has three of those active cables, and that allows you to run a larger amount of power consumption. Essentially, you can run three times as many electric appliances in your home on 3-phase than you can on single-phase.

Another benefit of 3-phase is that you can use appliances that only work on 3-phase. Some large air conditioners for instance will need a 3-phase supply, so you need to know whether your home has those sort of appliances.

Do I need 3-phase power if I’m going to go all electric?

Absolutely not. Single-phase is more than suitable for an all-electric home.

I suggest you need a supply capacity of 50 amps. There’s a little label written on the main switch in your switchboard which will give you a number and then the letter A – that’s a good guide of the amps being supplied to your house.

I have a 50 amps, single-phase supply to my townhome, and we are running 4 reverse cycle split air conditioners, a heat pump, hot water system, and an induction cooktop.

We’ve also got an EV charger – a single phase 32 amps, which is also known as 7.2 kilowatts. That’s the fastest and biggest charger you can get for a single-phase home installation.

We’ve also have 6 kilowatts of solar panels. So single-phase, 50 amps, is more than enough for our all-electric home, with solar and an EV.

There is some benefit to having 3-phase. It can support a slightly faster EV charger and has the ability spread the loads across your home. And if you’ve got a bigger home, it’s certainly required. But for most three to four bedroom homes in Australia, single-phase is going to be more than suitable for an all-electric home.

If we all went to 3phase power will that mean we need a hell of a lot more power coming through the grid?

If we did all go to 3-phase power, there’d be a lot of work for the power line workers – we call them ‘linies’ in the industry. They’re the ones upgrading all the overhead lines and there would be a lot of work for them to be pulling new cables across to each house.

It would actually end up providing a more balanced grid, because you could then have the load spread across each phase. Because at the moment, every second house is on a different phase.

If you walk down the street, and you look up and see a power line you’ll see four lines overhead. That’s a three-phase overhead line. The first house will come off A phase. You walk to the next house it might come off B phase. Then the next house will come off C phase.

If each house that’s on A phase electrified, but the houses on B and C phase didn’t electrify, then the grid would see an overload of demand on the A phase.

Three-phase is great for balancing out those loads, but natural selection will mean that all the houses on a phase won’t electrify at the same time, so it will sort of even itself out in time.

HEAT PUMPS

How noisy are heat pump hot water systems? I’ve heard they can be loud.

They sure can be. Cheap and nasty heat pump hot water systems can have a really loud fan, and that’s one of the reasons why they’re cheap – they haven’t used high quality components to build them.

They haven’t been given the space inside the unit to move around and work independently of other parts. So there’s been compromises on the design, and that can cause them to be quite loud.

It’s actually something of a problem and giving heat pump hot water systems a bad reputation when I talk about them with customers. The good thing is that a lot of the good quality systems have timers on them, so you can run them during the day.

When you can use your solar if you have it?

Exactly right, so you can optimize your solar and run it during the day when you’re most likely at work, or even if you are at home, there’s plenty of other noise around.

The typical noise of a heat pump hot water system is no louder than your average air conditioner, so it’s not an unusual sound to have around the home. In any case, it’s not like a jet engine taking off down the side of your house just to heat up the tank of water.

What about people who don’t have much space outside, where can they put their heat pumps because it’s a two part system?

It is a two part system, but there’s some great advancements in the technology where there’s actually some all-in-one systems which have the tank underneath and the heat pump sitting on top. They’re about two feet in diameter and about six feet tall, and they can tuck into a nice little corner of a courtyard or down the side of the house without taking up too much space.

It’s a real design consideration for the plumber and the electrician to work out how to best optimise the available space.

How much should I be paying to get a good, efficient hot water heat pump?

If you’re eligible for all of the rebates in Victoria, specifically, you should be able to get a really high quality, top of the range, all-in-one heat pump installed for about $3,500. For a split system unit you’ll need to add another couple of thousand dollars. So about $5,500 will see you into one of the best heat pump hot water systems you can get – a nice and quiet, highly efficient unit that doesn’t rely on extra heating elements to achieve its recovery rate.

This is one of the key metrics for the efficiency of a heat pump hot water system – how quickly can the heat pump reheat a fresh tank of ambient temperature water that’s coming into it?

So anywhere from $3,500 to $5,500 will give you a really high-quality hot water heat pump.

Can I also add you need to check that the heat pump has a decent length time warranty as well.

Absolutely. And party to that is having a warranty that’s backed by a company that’s been around for a long time – it will have local support and a good industry name so that you know when they put a 5 year warranty on the sticker, they will be around in 5 years to pick up the phone. That’s a key consideration when looking at a warranty.

What should I say to a tradie who says that heat pumps are no good?

I’d get them to look up getoffgas.com.au because we are really keen to educate tradies on the benefits of all this new technology that can save their customers money.

People often have their existing trade network on the fridge, or in a little book by the phone, and they call their existing electrician or plumber and say, hey, I’ve heard about these heat pump things. What do you think? And sadly, that contractor may not have any knowledge of this technology and the benefits that it can bring their customer. They may give a throwaway line that suggests they cost too much to run, or they’re more of a headache than they’re worth.

We’re really keen to educate tradies so they can give really good advice up front. Or if they don’t know straight away, they can say, I’ve heard they’re really good  but let me get back to you, I’ll make a few calls to some suppliers, and I’ll come up with a plan for you.

What about somebody who has had a heat pump installed and now it’s not working and the installer won’t return their calls. What should they do?

It’s a difficult one. Something that we see all too often with these rebates that pop up, is often there’s businesses that pop up with them.

You’ll get a flyer in the letterbox that says – ‘super cheap heat pump, too good to be true’. You go ahead with it, get it installed, and it all seems to be going well, until, like you said, it stops working. You can’t get onto the original installer because they’re a subcontractor and they’ve gone missing.

The best thing you can do is call your local plumber. Ring around, find a local plumber who can get your hot water system up and running again – often they can provide a temporary solution so you’re not without hot water.

Then you need to go back to the regulatory bodies. Solar Victoria in Victoria probably administered one of the rebates that you’ve got, so they should be able to offer you some support.

Unfortunately, this is something that the industry is grappling with. Much like solar was, it’s been relatively unregulated on the installation side. There are not enough people out there doing audits on these installs.

It’s something that the industry and the rebate schemes need to come to terms with pretty quickly, because it’s going to be a bigger and bigger problem with these unscrupulous installations happening.

SOLAR 

Should solar be the first step if I want to electrify my home?

Not necessarily. You really want to think about the consumption side of the energy equation before you think about the production side.

Traditionally, homeowners often get solar on the roof first of all, and then they’ll go, OK, great. Now, what do I do? I’m at work all day, I have a gas hot water system, gas heating and cooling. What’s the good of having solar on my roof?

Thinking about it from the consumption side first is really important because then you have something to go off – you will know how much energy you’re using to power your reverse cycle air conditioners, to use your heat pump hot water heating every day, etc. So you can size your solar system to suit that demand.

It enables you to use science and data to inform what size solar array you need, so you don’t have to go back a year or two later and increase the size of your solar system because you’ve now changed over all of your appliances to be electric.

If I don’t have a north facing roof, is there any point in putting solar on my roof?

No, that’s a bit of a misnomer. The sun comes from all directions, including south, so in summer, the sun will be setting 20 degrees south of the western sunset, due west, in Victoria.

I have some south facing panels on my roof and over the course of the year, they produce 60% of the output of my north facing panels.

You need to make the best of the situation you’ve got. An east-west facing roof is kind of the best setup for solar – you can have some panels facing the sunrise, some facing the sunset, and you get a really nice production of energy over the course of the day, as opposed to a north facing install, which gets you a nice high peak at a maximum in the middle of the day, but it gives you a really sharp bell curve.

If you imagine the curve starting in the morning when the sun comes up, and then topping out in the middle of the day and then ramping down in the afternoon, you want as much volume in that curve as possible.

An east-west setup is great, but if all you’ve got to work with is bit of east, a bit of west, and maybe a little bit of south, then speak to your installer how you can get optimise a solution. There’s always a solution to find something that will suit your roof.

How do I know if my solar system is actually working?

Yes, good point, or whether it’s been connected to the grid properly, and is showing up on your bills.

I’ve seen customers who move into a house and they look at their energy bill. They can see solar panels on their roof, but they’re not seeing anything on their energy bill. Perhaps the monitoring system has never been connected to their email address.

Have a look at the little label on the side of your inverter. It should show a manufacturer’s name and a model number. Give them a call and just say, I have an inverter from, ABC inverters, and they’ll be able to help connect it to the network. You may need to get a solar installer out to help you do that.

There also might be a little cable missing that needs to be added in, but for the most part inverters have the ability to show you production and consumption monitoring, either on an app or logging into a web page.

The other way is to see it on your energy bill, so make sure the electrician who installed the system has connected it back to the grid. Your energy retailer should show how much power you’re feeding back into the grid every month that you’re not consuming. That’s a really good indicator that your solar system is working.

The optimisation of your system is a little bit more detailed. That would require a solar installer who’s generally an electrician as well. They could come out and make sure that your system is working to its optimum efficiency – that it’s clean and all the connections are nice and tight and haven’t got any water or corrosion happening to them.

You should really do that every two to three years. If you can access your panels yourself safely and give them a bit of a clean, do that every 6 months, but you want to get your solar system serviced every few years, so that you know it’s working really well.

SPACE HEATING

What are the best solutions to replace my ducted gas heating?

We have a lot of ducted gas in Victoria and people think it works really well, but I reckon if they looked underneath the house, they might find a couple of ducts that were pumping warm air into the ether. They may have no idea whether it’s even connected anymore, because the old duct tape has come loose over the last 15 years.

The best way to replace them is with individual reverse cycle split systems. These are the units set up on the wall inside, and an outdoor unit with a fan in it. They’re the most efficient because you can turn them on and off depending on whether you’re in the room or not.

In the old gas ducted systems, you turn it on and the whole house heats up, but it might only be one or two people in the house – the kids might have moved out, so you got a few empty bedrooms – and you’re heating all of that extra volume for no benefit.

The reverse cycle split systems sits in the lounge room, you can close the doors and turn on that particular unit, and when you leave the room you turn it off and it stops using electricity really quickly.

You then go into the master bedroom, turn on the one up on the wall, and the room will be warm within a few minutes. That’s a really efficient way to heat the spaces that you’re living in. You don’t need to be heating up the hallway when you walk through there for five seconds a few times a day. You can isolate the rooms you need to heat.

If you get rid of the ducted gas, seal up the existing vents in the floor. There are some great products out there. You can also drop some insulation into the existing vents. You don’t need to redo the timber floors.

Is reverse cycle air conditioning the only economical and environmentally sensible option for heating and cooling my home?

It’s a really efficient way to generate heat within the home.

There are other electric solutions, so you can look at resistive electric, little panel heaters. There are a few brands out there. You can also get some that have oil reservoirs in them – they kind of work like an oil heater, but they use electricity to heat them up.

They all use electricity like your kettle or toaster does, so they’re just heating up an element.

The real efficiency comes from the heat pump technology used in reverse cycle air conditioners. It extracts the hot air molecules from the atmosphere outside and brings them into your home, using physics, through the coils and the refrigerant lines, and dispels those hot air molecules inside the home.

Even if the hot the air temperature outside is down to zero or below zero, there’s still little hot air molecules in there. The physics and the science of a heat pump create the efficiency.

You can still find electric solutions if your space is constrained and you don’t have room to put an air conditioner or heat pump outside. For instance, in a little bathroom, a small resistive panel might be the solution there.

So no, reverse cycle air conditioners are not the only solution, but they are, by far and away, the most efficient solution for heating and cooling a space.

For those of us who don’t like the type of heat that an air conditioning system provides – we find them blowy and unpleasant – how can I make my air conditioning system less blowy and unpleasant?

That’s a common bit of feedback we get from our customers – they’re not big fans of the air conditioner blowing heat down on them.

Often in the same room though where an air conditioner is there is also a ceiling fan. Turn the ceiling fan onto one. You don’t need to flick the summer-winter switch, although it will help if you flick it over to winter, so the fan will spin in the opposite direction. Turn the ceiling fan on and it will help move the warm air from up high in the ceiling, and it cause the reverse cycle air conditioner to turn off more regularly and stop blowing hot air in.

The reason it’s blowing is because it hasn’t yet reached temperature, and that’s often because all the hot air is sitting up in the ceiling waiting to come down. Which means you’re filling all of the volume up above the air conditioner before you’re feeling any of the warmth down low.

If you flip the ceiling fan on and get it moving around, and you’ll find the air conditioner will work a lot more efficiently, but also blow air around less often, and much improve the environment of the heating.

ELECTRIC VEHICLES

If I don’t have off street parking, is there any point in getting an electric vehicle?

I was in Sydney a few months ago, and we were in a Tesla Uber, and I asked the driver, what’s your charging set up, how often do you charge at home or at a fast charger?

He said that his driveway doesn’t fit his Tesla, so he always charges at a fast-charging station, and that was no problem for him. He had a subscription service with one of the local providers, and it was costing him $70 a month on that subscription, and he was driving 40,000 kilometers a year. So he had come up with a solution.

It is a fairly big sticking point in the uptake of EVs that people don’t have a curb side solution if they don’t have off street parking. Different councils are working on solutions. Some are putting in pedestals.

In Victoria there’s a pedestal installation scheme that is being piloted where a charging post is installed by the gutter. But it relies on you getting back to that same parking spot each time, which isn’t always possible when it’s public parking.

Curbside charging solutions are definitely a big gap to be bridged in the EV uptake. It shouldn’t be as difficult as it is.

And there’s also trials of chargers being put onto telegraph poles.

That’s right, I have seen that happening up in Sydney. That relies on the participation of the polls and wires companies, the DNSPs, so hopefully there can be some more collaboration to provide solutions.

It should be really simple – you pull up next to a power pole, you plug in the car, it knows who you are because you’ve got a VIN and a license, and it should be able to link back to your home electricity bill no matter where you are in the country. It’s just the technology and the bureaucracy that needs to be bridged.

When do I need a charger at home?

It depends how far you’re driving. Many of my customers can get by just plugging into a simple 10 amp or 15 amp powerPoint. A 10 amp power point, any power point in your home, provides enough charge for people to top up 10 to 15% of their car overnight. If you’re not doing a lot of driving that can often be enough.

If you are doing a little bit more driving in a week, you might need a dedicated smart charger to top up your car on a single-phase installation which will give you a recharge time of about 10 hours. I’m generalising because different vehicles have different battery sizes, but 10 hours on single-phase and about six hours on three-phase.

It really depends on what your needs are. If you’re not doing a lot of driving, a power point is more than suitable.

For those of us who live in an apartment with strata, how can I convince my neighbors that installing an EV charger is a good thing?

Strata is a challenge because the owners corporation managers are often very risk adverse, and if they hear about an EV charging in a basement, they run for the hills.

They don’t need to. The RACV, which is the Victorian royal automotive club, have EV chargers in their basement in Bourke Street, so if it’s good enough for them, it should be good enough for any other multi-level building.

If you raise it with strata, do it with information. Do some research. Get a few documents together from insurance companies who don’t mind the idea of EV charging so that when the initial rebuts come from the owner’s corp that says, we don’t want the risk, our insurer won’t cover you, you’ve got information to present straight away. Give them something to think about.

Speak to the other residents about the upside of EV chargers on the added value of their homes and apartments, so that they all realize that having an EV charger is actually a real asset to the property, not a nuisance.

SMART TECHNOLOGIES

What are all these smart technologies that people are talking about?

Smart technology could be applicable to just about any electrical appliance. For instance, I can turn my coffee machine on by telling my phone to turn the coffee machine on. It’s not a particularly smart coffee machine, but it’s got a little device between it and the power point that is smart.

A lot of these appliances that are being replaced as part of the electrification upgrade have inbuilt ‘smarts’. You can get a hot water system that is Wi Fi connected and app controlled, so you can check the temperature, increase the temperature, or turn on a booster element from the comfort of bed.

Similarly, with your reverse cycle air conditioners, you can have an app controlling them that turns them on before you get home. Any electrical appliance can be made smart and many of them are coming with inbuilt ‘smarts’ so that they’ve got a competitive advantage over market competitors.

With EV chargers, there’s a clear difference between just plugging into a power point, or using a smart charger. A smart charger can be programed to access your solar generation, to work out what else your house is consuming at that time, to determine whether your car gets the power or not. So there’s a big advantage of it having smarts over just plugging into a power point. 

Do I need a smart home energy management system if I fully electrify my home?

Smart home energy management systems are part of the equation, because then you can understand your home better and interact with it on a more individualized level – you can know when your home is producing power from the solar and you can get your appliances working optimally.

Your electrician will be able to help you to get some monitoring on your consumption as well as your production from your solar system. There’s an added level of complexity when you get a battery, and that really comes down to the installer setting up your devices, as well as your phone and iPads which become dashboards to see the state of play within your home.

We’ve never interacted with our appliances like this before. Previously the main thing we needed to worry about was whether we turned off the light as we left a room. Now we’re looking at setting timers on our washing machines and dishwashers so that we’re accessing the solar generation during windows of opportunity, or when the time of use tariffs are optimised on our energy bills.

I have my coffee machine set to turn on at 5.30 am so that it does the majority of its power consumption before my energy rate changes at 6 am and I get up to make coffee at quarter past six. It’s done all the heavy lifting, and all that power has been consumed In the off peak period, instead of the peak period.

FINDING A GOOD INSTALLER

A lot of people want to know how to find a tradie they can trust, the people who are going to be doing the heavy lifting installing all the appliances we will need for us all to fully electrify. Can you suggest three questions people should ask a tradie to determine whether they’re a good fit?

Trust is an absolutely imperative part of this electrification change.

The first question you can ask is, are you licensed? These trades that will be doing the electrification changes within your home should all be licensed trades, and they should be registered with the relevant industry bodies.

Ask to see that licence when they’re quoting on your works. It may already be on the header of their quotes. You can look that up on the government websites and make sure that they’re legitimate. That’s the first step.

The next step is a tradie that’s worth their salt, who’s invested in giving you a really good outcome, should come out to your home, and they should be proactive. They should be asking, when are you home? Can I come by after work or before work to have a look at your situation?

That ensures the advice they’re giving you is suited to your home, and you’re not just getting a cookie cutter response, ‘here’s your hot water system, this is what we install everywhere, we’re going to slap it in your backyard, and it’ll all be fine’.

When they do show up, you want to make sure that they are taking their time to explain to you, in layman’s terms, in a way that you can understand, what the solution is that they’re recommending, that they’re sitting down with you at the kitchen table, which is where a lot of these decisions are made. That they build your trust. That they understand the products, the rebates, and they’re talking you through and really nurturing you through the process.

You need to know they’re going to be there for the long haul, that they’re not just dropping a flyer off in your letterbox and disappearing after the install is done, that they’re really invested in the solution that they’re providing.

Sounds like we need a lot more Brendan Langs!

I wish I could duplicate myself just to run my own business, let alone solve this problem.

It’s a really, really important thing that tradies are giving good advice, but also that we’re encouraging young people, men and women, to get into the electrical industry if they’re passionate about taking action on climate change.

I don’t think there’s a better way than doing an electrical apprenticeship and getting into the electrification space, because we are desperate for motivated, intelligent, and passionate people to enact this change. No matter what stage of your career you’re in, we always want more great electricians.

Battle climate change and become an electrician! Just before I let you go, I understand there’s something of a crisis in training for new apprentices, certainly in Victoria. You’ve told me that new apprentices are waiting up to one year to start their classroom training because of the scarcity of tech teachers. What would you like the government to do about that?

It is a real crisis. Apprentices are sitting on the sidelines. They’re not getting their early training that they should be getting in the classroom within the first year of their apprenticeship.

It is a product of decades of under investment and undervaluing the trade sector, and now when we’re in a time where we really need our tradies the government needs to take some action really quickly and not get caught up in having lots of conversations and dialogs about how they can fix it.

They need to incentivise tradies who have been in the industry a long time. If they’re going to retire, bring them back into the classroom so they can help deliver this education to the next generation.

I’m not sure if there’s any mechanism at the moment which incentivizes tradies to get into the classroom quickly. There are some training programs that tradies can do to become educators, but that takes a large commitment of many months, and many, many traders just don’t have the time to dedicate to that.

Something like a buddy system, where a retiring tradie or a tradie who’s closing down their business, can jump in the classroom beside a tech teacher. I’m sure that within a couple of weeks, they would have been able to learn enough of the ropes to start delivering this content and run a class of their own with the guidance of an experienced educator. That way, we can have a real crossover of tradies who have got an education background, who have been in a classroom for a long time, and tradies who have an on-site background.

That way they can deliver the education to twice as many kids, because there’s not enough action happening, and we need some new ideas.

You can also hear the full interview with Brendan Lang on the SwitchedOn podcast.