“Not just a call centre:” Home battery contender doubles down on Australia-made strengths

The Australian home battery outfit whose customers include federal energy minister Chris Bowen is doubling down on its strengths of local manufacturing, technical capability and sovereign supply chains, with an expansion of its team of customer support staff, including in-house electricians.

Brisbane-based RedEarth Energy Storage, which builds its range of residential and commercial batteries at a manufacturing facility in Darra, says it has expanded its team to 12 staff, including Australian-based qualified electricians, to support its installer partners in a market that is running red hot.

Home battery uptake in Australia has defied all odds since the federal Albanese government launched its Cheaper Home Batteries rebate in July 2025. Just last week, the number of batteries installed through the scheme sailed past 400,000, showing no signs of slowing down, even as new rules come into play.  

This means that batteries have continued to be installed at the rate of 2,000 a day, including weekends, although the average battery size appears to have reduced from around 28 kWh to 25 kWh, in response to the rebate’s new settings.

The boom has attracted a huge range of different products and new market players, some of which – like the China-based companies Sigenery and Fox ESS – have very quickly come to dominate sales in the rush to home energy storage. Fox ESS, for instance, installed a mind-boggling 25,000 systems in April – well above its March numbers, too, of 19,000 installations.

The Clean Energy Regulator, alongside state-based authorities, has been watching closely over the industry-wide phenomenal growth, to keep tabs on whether installers are following all the rules and regulations that ensure batteries are installed safely and – once installed – operate the way they should.

But as Energy Matters explains here, these checks and balances don’t necessarily address one of the most common “pain points” to surface after home battery installations – which is the chain of responsibility for servicing, if something goes wrong post-installation.   

Image: RedEarth Energy Storage

RedEarth, which has timed its latest announcement to coincide with Australian Made Week, says the expansion of its “customer success team” is about committing to quality, service and accountability.

This includes making every RedEarth battery fully traceable, with a record of images of each battery being built, wired and tested, that can be tapped to support new installations and to troubleshoot any issues that crop up.

“While global OEM/manufacturers use global call centres to relay messages for technical support requests that could take up to two weeks to be addressed, we’re doubling down on our focus to lift quality standards for our installer partners and to deliver a quality installation for every … customer,” says RedEarth CEO Mark Sheldon.

“We have built a real technical support operation with qualified electricians in Australia, not just a call centre. When an installer calls us, we can see exactly how a battery was built, how it was tested, and how it left our factory. That is only possible because RedEarth manufactures our batteries in Australia.”

RedEarth launched onto the residential battery market in 2021 when its Troppo product became the first fully Australian designed and assembled home batteries to get Clean Energy Council approval.

In 2024 – in the era before the launch of the federal Labor’s Cheaper Home Batteries scheme – the Troppo was revealed as the battery of choice of the energy minister, with Bowen revealing he had bought one after a visit to the company’s stand at the 2023 Smart Energy Conference & Exhibition.

In 2025, the company unveiled its next generation Troppo Ultra, with a boost to capacity of 5.6 kWh per unit and an in-built Battery Management System, which is used in the company’s Gecko, all-in-one plug-and-play home battery energy storage system.

Sheldon says a new onboarding program for installers will be introduced in the second half of 2026 where RedEarth will be available to support an installer through the entire battery installation and commissioning process in real-time with an in-house electrician.

“In the past, we’ll ship a battery to our distributor or installer and we’ll only know it’s being installed when we get a call asking for help during an installation,” he says.

“We’ve built a new customer experience with our new onboarding program that allows RedEarth to validate and review an installation once it’s been completed.”

RedEarth says the onboarding program will include a live WhatsApp integration in the support platform giving installers working on-site a channel to share photos and exchange technical information asynchronously, eliminating the need to pause work to make calls with RedEarth’s customer success team.

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