How we worked out the salt-air article.

The standard behind it

The whole piece rests on one national standard: AS 4312 "Atmospheric corrosivity zones in Australia", which maps onto the international ISO 9223 scheme and sorts outdoor environments into categories C1 to C5. It's published by Standards Australia. Because the standard itself sits behind a paywall, we cite the freely available industry write-up of its zone table and distance rule from the Australian Steel Institute. The requirement that a solar installer actually assess the site's corrosion category and spec the hardware to it comes from the Clean Energy Council's guidance on the installation standard AS/NZS 5033.

The "roughly one kilometre, with an exception for flat terrain and strong onshore winds" rule is quoted verbatim from the Australian Steel Institute's summary of AS 4312. That exception is the single most important sentence for Newcastle, and it's why we describe the east-coast surf suburbs as bending the tidy one-kilometre rule rather than obeying it.

The geography figures

The elevations and distances on the cross-section are real, not modelled. They're taken from Australia's public G-NAF (Geocoded National Address File) address-point data, queried for this article in July 2026. Elevations are single address-point ground heights; distances are straight-line ("as the crow flies") from the Bar Beach shoreline, which is itself the beachfront reference point.

The honest caveats we built in

• No street gets a corrosion rating. The shaded bands on the diagram show what the standard's distance logic suggests, nothing more. AS 4312 categories are determined on site by the person doing the install, because they depend on exposure and local wind that a map can't see. We say this on the diagram, in the caption and again in the article.
• Distance from Bar Beach isn't the whole story for every suburb. Newcastle East and Stockton each front their own surf or harbour water, so their distance from Bar Beach understates their real salt exposure, they're near-shore on their own coastline. We flag this rather than plotting them naively on the transect.
• Dixon Park is a beach, not a suburb. It's the stretch of coast between Bar Beach and Merewether and it isn't a gazetted G-NAF locality, so we use it only as a map landmark, never as a data pin with its own figures.
• Elevation is a secondary factor, and we didn't exaggerate it. The whole transect is low (roughly 8 to 16 metres), so distance from the surf, not height, is the main driver. The vertical scale on the diagram is honest to that, which is why the terrain looks gently undulating rather than dramatic. Horizontal spacing past New Lambton is compressed to fit Fletcher on the page, and that compression is marked; the real distance is printed on every marker so position never has to be trusted over the number.
• Two different figures for "the elevation of Fletcher" both exist and both are real. A single address-point sample gives 7.9 m; a suburb-centroid rollup gives about 32 m. That spread is honest evidence of real terrain variation within a suburb, not an error, so we cite the specific address-point figures used on the diagram rather than a single "the elevation of X".
• Corrosion is kept separate from wind. AS 4312 (material durability) and AS/NZS 1170.2 (wind loading) are different standards answering different questions. Newcastle is wind Region A (non-cyclonic), and we're careful not to let "coastal" imply "cyclone-rated".

What is deliberately absent

No prices, no rebate amounts, no per-kilowatt figures, no guaranteed outputs, no panel or inverter brand names, and no claim that this business holds any specific accreditation number. Those are all either things that move constantly or things a webpage has no honest business asserting. Where a credential matters, the federal rebate for instance, we describe the general bar (a CEC-accredited installer) rather than naming a licence we can't verify for your job.

Sources