How this directory works

Where the listings come from

The 206 solar installers listed here are sourced from the Google Places API for Melbourne suburbs. Ratings, review counts and the reviews shown on profiles come from Google, always displayed with the reviewer's name and attribution. Every listing is refreshed within 30 days, so what you see stays close to what Google shows today. We do not scrape websites for reviews and we do not write reviews.

How rankings are computed

Lists on this site are ordered by Google rating, highest first, with the number of Google reviews as the tiebreaker. That is the whole formula. Suburb pages only exist where at least 3 businesses serve the suburb, so you never land on a page with one lonely listing presented as a "best of" list.

No pay for placement, ever. Businesses cannot buy a higher position. If we later offer paid features to businesses, such as claiming a listing to receive quote requests, paying will never change where anyone ranks. If that ever stops being true, this page will say so in plain words.

What the badges mean

• CEC accredited: the business appears in the Clean Energy Council's accredited installer records.
• ABN verified: we found the business's ABN on its own website, validated it with the official checksum, and confirmed it as active against the Australian Business Register, which also gives us the registered entity name shown on the badge.
• Operating since: the year the business's ABN became active, from the Australian Business Register. Note this is the age of the business, which is not always the same as its years in solar.
• Recently reviewed: the newest Google review we hold for the business was published within the last 90 days.
• New reviews in the last 90 days: we record each business's rating and review count every time we refresh it. When those records show the review count growing over at least 30 days, we display the increase. We report growth only; we never interpret it.

Where the brand data comes from

The brand rankings are counted from each business's own website, scanned against a fixed dictionary of equipment brands sold in Australia. A mention means the brand appears on the installer's site. It does not mean the brand endorses the installer or the other way around, and it is not a quality rating of the brand.

Where the price data comes from

The figures on our prices page come from two places, and each number says which one it came from. Public figures are taken from named sources such as the Solar Choice Price Index, the Clean Energy Regulator's installation data and Solar Victoria, always with a link and the date we last checked them. Our own figures come from quotes people run through the free Quote Checker.

We publish a number from our own data only once at least 20 reliable quotes back it for that system size, and we always show the sample size and the period the quotes cover. Below that threshold you see public figures only. We never publish anything traceable to a single quote.

How the Quote Checker handles your quote

The Quote Checker never stores your name, email, phone number or the quote document itself. If you upload or paste a quote, it is read once to pull out the system details and price, shown back to you to confirm, and the file is discarded. What we keep is the anonymous system data: size, component brands, inverter type, battery and price. That anonymous data is what builds the Melbourne price index over time.

The checks it runs are fixed rules, not AI opinions: your price against the published market range for your system size, your components against the official approved lists, and questions worth asking your installer about the system design. It is general information to take into your conversation with installers, not advice.

What we get out of this

Quote requests you submit go to the business you chose. In future, businesses may pay to claim their listing and receive their quote requests directly, and this site may earn money that way. That funding model never affects rankings, badges or which businesses are listed. Listing here is free and automatic for every solar installer Google knows about in the suburbs we cover.

Questions about the method, or found something wrong? Browse the directory or read our guides.