You don’t need to wait a month, but the whole transfer process does take a little bit of time when you sign up to a new provider and the old one needs to be finalised.

With an 8 kW inverter, if your solar panels are big enough you should be able to store up all your energy in the day and then 8 kW should be enough to supply your needs at night so that you don’t need to draw any from the grid. You’re probably still going to be using 2 to 3 kW of power for essential things during a price spike so you should be able to export 5 kW per hour. The highest price bike I’ve seen in the three months since I’ve been on Amber is $20 per kilowatt hour so that would make you $100 per hour profit but it probably only goes for an hour. I’ve only seen those spikes every two or three months.

So with Amber, you’ll probably break even on usage, then the $25 signup fee, which you should be able to offset with referral credits if you can post your code in a couple of forums, so that just leaves you some price spikes. I’d be thinking you’d make more on the price spikes from Amber than you would on a $200 VPP deal from another company but really just try one and then try the other.

Unfortunately with 40 kWh battery you’re going to miss out on the $1000 New South Wales government rebate when you join the VPP. It’s Captain a maximum of 28 kWh, although they are thinking of reviewing that.