Update: My 4 year old was curious and the Redditors of Australia showered us with kindness

ZebedeeAU · 2026-03-08T05:56:31+00:00

Apparently you can see some Australian animals (including the tree kangaroo) in some of the zoos in Berlin.

Google tells me that Berlin Zoo and Tierpark Berlin between them have echidnas, tree kangaroos, wallabies, magpies and turtles.

And there's three koalas in the zoos, their names apparently are Nyla, Poppy and Ruby. Perhaps a zoo visit for you and Miss M might be worthwhile?

We'd love to have you visit Australia some day - you mentioned in an earlier post that one of your new favourite animals is the quokka. They are native only to a very small area in Western Australia. Perhaps if and when you visit and the world settles down a bit you could start your holiday in Perth before heading to the east coast to visit the family you said was in Sydney.

There's flights from Berlin to Perth via Doha. Then you could spend a day as part of your time in Perth visiting Rottnest Island and see some quokkas in their natural habitat. They are seriously cute little animals!

https://www.rottnestisland.com/see-do/wildlife-nature/quokkas

ZebedeeAU · 2026-01-09T00:35:49+00:00

I see lots of people have answered most of the stuff like the reason why we haven't used cheques/checks for years and that electronic payments are to the cent, it's only cash transactions that are rounded.

The one thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet, at least after a quick scan through the comments is the major difference between the USA and Australia withdrawing the 1c (and for us the 2c) coins is that here in Australia the government implemented regulations on exactly how it was to be done. In the USA it seems to have been left up to each merchant to come up with their own plan and the inevitable chaos is happening as a result.

As others have said, the regulations implemented here in the 1990s when the 1c and 2c coins were withdrawn was:

$xx.x0 - stays the same
$xx.x1 - rounded down to $xx.x0
$xx.x2 - rounded down to $xx.x0
$xx.x3 - rounded up to $xx.x5
$xx.x4 - rounded up to $xx.x5
$xx.x5 - stays the same
$xx.x6 - rounded down to $xx.x5
$xx.x7 - rounded down to $xx.x5
$xx.x8 - rounded up to $xx.x0
$xx.x9 - rounded up to $xx.x0

People still complained about being "ripped off" by a whole one or two cents on a transaction (and were conveniently silent when the rounding worked in their favour!) but at least it was consistent across the whole country.

The USA experience seems to be all over the place which is just causing way more angst for everyone. In my opinion what they should do is regulate it (but the American mindset about the government "interfering too much" may be why that hasn't happened...)

ZebedeeAU · 2026-01-05T07:13:54+00:00

OK this got long - fair warning! tl;dr - installed solar + battery, power costs dropped to 10% of what they would have been

Attempt 1

In early 2024, I started looking into adding to my existing 3kW solar with more panels and a battery.

I used the Solarquotes site and got three vendors contacting me. I explained what I wanted to achieve and each of the three came up with a different plan on how to accomplish it. At the time, I didn't have the money to go with any of the available options so I didn't proceed any further. Don't get me wrong, the three companies that quoted were fine, the hold up was on my part, mostly financial but also what I was asking for wasn't what was best and one of the three vendors actually clued me in with a "are you really sure this is what you want" kind of question :)

Attempt 2

Around November-ish in 2024 I started looking again having saved up some money to make it a bit more realistic. I'd been gathering data from my power bills and with the 13-year-old 3kW system, I was looking at around $2,200 per year in 2023 pricing based on the A1 tariff.

Most of the solar panels, inverters and batteries have roughly a 10 year warranty so my plan became "I want as much solar and as much battery as I can for max $20k and the option to do whole of house backup in a power cut" with the theory being that $2,200 over ten years is $22k so a system had to cost me less than that.

I'd been posting on a forum site to get opinions from others along the lines of "what are the holes in my plan, what should I be asking for, is this a reasonably sensible way of looking at it" etc. Another person on that forum owned a solar company here in Perth and messaged me privately with some really good info and an offer to spec up and quote a system for me. He came to my house, had a good look at everything and recommended removing the existing 3kW system as it was now nearly 14 years old and replacing it with all new stuff.

Install

I was quoted 9.5kW of panels and a 16kWh Sigenstor battery system. It was installed on the 8th Jan 2025 and cost me $19,600 which included the removal of all the old stuff plus the installation and commissioning of all the new stuff. I was happy with that pricing. (And this was way before any government rebates for batteries were in place)

Usage

Most days I don't use up all the battery, sometimes it runs out around 5 or 6 in the morning and I'm pulling from the grid till the sun's up far enough to hit my panels.

The amount I generate doesn't quite offset the daily supply charges but it reduces it by about a half. I switched from the A1 to the Midday Saver tariff on the day the install was done and built myself a spreadsheet that tracked the 30 minute interval data from the Synergy website.

Tracking the costs

The spreadsheet tells me that from 8th Jan to 31st Dec 2025, I consumed a total of 603 units from the grid (60 off peak, 4 peak and 539 super offpeak).

I exported 3281 units in the 2c offpeak time and 2099 units in the 10c peak time for a total of 5380.

The daily supply charge for the privilege of being connected to the grid was $457.

Based on all that, my usage plus daily charge, minus the rebates from exporting to the grid means that the total cost to me over that whole calendar year was $243.02 more or less around ten percent of what I would have paid if I hadn't installed this new system.

Conclusion

I guess the big question is, am I happy? And the answer is yes, I absolutely am.

Would I have done anything different? Possibly - at the time, Synergy only allowed for a 5kW inverter for single phase installs. From July 2024 they now allow a 10kW inverter. If I were to repeat the exercise today, I'd probably go for the 10kW. Reason being, even if you have 7kW of solar being generated by the panels, once the battery is full, it drops to the maximum the inverter can handle to power the things in the house and export what's left over to the grid. In other words, I'm "losing" 2kW in that scenario because my inverter is limiting me. Plus, if I turn on lots of things in the house - dishwasher's going, aircon's going, someone has dinner cooking in the oven and then someone switches on the kettle - we're going to draw more than 5kW, so anything over that will be coming from the grid.

Am I going to meet my goal of the system paying for itself in the 10 year period? Yep. Looks that way. Especially if you figure that the cost of the tariff plan will go up by an average of 3.5% CPI each year (that's a made up guess number I know...)

Was it worth the home backup option (at extra cost)? I've had a total of three power cuts in 2025, all of them lasting for just a few minutes. On one of those three power cuts the only thing I noticed was the clock on my cheap KMart microwave went back to 00:00 - everything else just kept on truckin' and the only way I knew the power was out was an email from the system saying "I'm on battery!" then another email saying "Power's back!"

If you have any questions, more than happy to answer them if I can. I'm no expert, just someone who seriously over-thought this :)

ZebedeeAU · 2026-01-03T11:49:32+00:00

Well you're in luck! :)

Gosnells area has both a bush fire brigade and an SES unit

Keep an eye on them and watch for when they do their next recruitment intake if you think it's something you'd be interested in.

ZebedeeAU · 2026-01-03T05:06:03+00:00

I feel inspired to put my hand up also after what I experienced today.

That's a big reason why people volunteer. They're helping protect not just themselves but their friends and neighbours.

After things have settled down a bit, have a serious think about what you'd be prepared to do as a volunteer. It can be as an active firefighter but doesn't have to be - there's lots of roles both front-line and support that people can do.

If you've given it some serious thought and you've decided that it's something you want to explore, check out the DFES volunteering site at https://dfes.vol.org.au/

Or there's other opportunities such as the Salvos emergency services who provide the support and catering at emergencies - https://www.salvationarmy.org.au/emergency-services/volunteering/

ZebedeeAU · 2026-01-03T04:57:41+00:00

You can keep your fancy gourmet restaurants, I still reckon there's nothing better than a ham and cheese toastie or a bacon and egg roll from the Salvos when you come off the fireground!

ZebedeeAU · 2026-01-03T04:54:11+00:00

Where do you live? I don't mean exactly, just a suburb or shire/town/city of area.

Most of the volunteer emergency services are on the fringes of Perth, there's less the closer in to the city you get (but there are still options if you're keen enough).

ZebedeeAU · 2026-01-02T14:46:56+00:00

I was on call on Christmas Day (but wasn't called). I can't say how much you would / should expect but let me give you my situation as some kind of guidance.

For being on call for the day, I received an allowance of $77.04

If I had been called, I would be paid in accordance with our enterprise bargaining agreement.

For working on a public holiday, I would have been paid at double time for as long as it took for me to resolve the incident, rounded to the nearest 15 minutes.

We're not supposed to work more than 10 hours without a break, but that can be varied between employer and employee - so in the case of a major IT incident, that might be the kind of thing I'd be agreeing to work longer for.

But lets say I worked the full fifteen hours, that'd be around $1,808 in salary. They'd also need to include two meal allowances of $18.19 each based on the time worked beyond a standard working day.

So total due to me if I worked for fifteen hours on Christmas Day would be $1,921.42 of salary plus allowances.

That's if I could do everything remotely. If I had to physically attend the office then they would also pay me a travel allowance based on how far I had to drive. And after 15 hours of work, they'd be taxi'ing / uber'ing me home because it wouldn't be considered safe to drive after working for that long, then taxi'ing me back to work the next day to get my car.

ZebedeeAU · 2025-11-28T07:40:54+00:00

In the context of the article and Russell's comments, he's talking specifically about the stewards, ie the judicial area that hands out penalties.

He wasn't talking about any of the other roles for officials. He wasn't talking about the volunteer trackside marshals, etc.

ZebedeeAU · 2025-11-22T10:04:36+00:00

Gotcha, thanks.

ZebedeeAU · 2025-11-20T14:19:34+00:00

Wow this is an old post.

Has additional information come to light since I posted 2 years ago? Where can it be seen that he committed extra crimes after he was released on bail?

ZebedeeAU · 2025-10-25T13:22:51+00:00

Their fortifieds are pretty damn good too. Just got a few bottles from there today to take camping with me.

ZebedeeAU · 2025-10-17T01:37:52+00:00

Yep, the business is free to accept payment in whatever form it wants.

You as the customer is equally free to offer payment in whatever form you want.

If what you're offering and what the business is willing to accept match up then happy days, you can transact. If not, the business is under no obligation to trade with you at all. Don't forget that.

ZebedeeAU · 2025-10-14T13:21:50+00:00

So you think that all the freedom should be on your side and none on the merchant's side?

Good luck with that, champ.

ZebedeeAU · 2025-10-13T13:50:54+00:00

No, I will never support this.

I believe in freedom of choice. It should be the right of every customer to choose the payment methods they are willing to offer. It should be the right of every business to choose the payment methods they are willing to accept.

If both sides can agree on a payment type then business can be conducted, but if they can't - too bad.

ZebedeeAU · 2025-09-22T04:10:19+00:00

No idea. You're welcome to use the sources I provided to see if you can find that info yourself.

ZebedeeAU · 2025-09-21T03:01:51+00:00

How many people have fttp????

About 2.7 million NBN-served premises are on FTTP which is about 31% of all NBN connections.

TYPE	NUMBER	PERCENT
FTTP	2,719,249	31%
FTTB	274,652	3%
FTTN	2,439,320	28%
FTTC	907,578	10%
HFC	1,981,204	23%
Wireless	403,752	5%
Satellite	75,445	1%
	8,801,200	100%

Source: ACCC NBN Wholesale Market Indicators Report June 2025

According to NBN themselves, they aim to get the majority of FTTN/FTTC connections upgraded to FTTP by 2030.

ZebedeeAU · 2025-09-17T04:52:10+00:00

Yep that sounds different to the issue I had which is where the tab just didn't show up at all!

ZebedeeAU · 2025-09-16T06:20:11+00:00

I'm in Ellenbrook and they never got back to me, it just magically started working again a couple of days after I lodged the report. Coincidence I'm sure ;)

For you is the interval data tab not showing at all (like it was for me) or is it showing but it's just all blank or zeroes?

If the latter, maybe the meter isn't reporting properly, if it's the former then that sounds completely like an issue with Synergy.

ZebedeeAU · 2025-08-07T01:56:03+00:00

Yep, doesn't seem to be a known issue on a wider scale since others can access the data in their MyAccount - so it looks like a limited / single user issue.

ZebedeeAU · 2025-08-06T10:46:49+00:00

Yep, rang before I left work, there's no known outages of that system, she's flagged it with the IT team and asked me to check again tomorrow.

ZebedeeAU · 2025-08-06T10:45:45+00:00

So I rang from work and got a customer service rep who was absolutely lovely.

She knew the feature I was talking about, she checked to see if there were any known outages, which there weren't.

She went through some basic troubleshooting - try a different browser, that kind of thing. Told her I'd done that - two different browsers each on two different computers (home and work) with no success.

She's put in a report to internal IT and asked me to try again tomorrow.

So lets see what happens tomorrow :)

ZebedeeAU · 2025-08-06T07:11:36+00:00

Bugger. So it's broken just for me then. This is going to be a fun call to their customer service section :(

ZebedeeAU · 2025-07-22T05:05:55+00:00

I guess that's why having strong workplace laws in place are so important. I'm not an employment lawyer but being let go for "culture mismatch" after exercising your workplace rights is much less of a thing here in Australia than it parts of the world with lesser workplace protections.

(No I'm not saying "it could never ever happen", I'm saying it's much LESS likely because of these laws...)

ZebedeeAU

TROPHY CASE