The old streets around New Lambton are some of the prettiest in Newcastle, and their big established trees are exactly what a solar design has to think about. Beautiful shade for the verandah is lost generation on the roof. Here's how we get it right.
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Streets like Avondale Road, Alma Road and Birdwood Street are lined with post-war brick homes on generous blocks, and the tree canopy that makes them lovely to live on is the single biggest thing we plan around. A jacaranda that only shades the roof for an hour in late afternoon might be fine; a big gum sitting over the north face is a different conversation.
The honest answer to "will the trees ruin it?" is almost always no, but only if the system is laid out around them. That can mean:
We'd rather design a tidy 6.6 kW system that actually performs than sell you 10 kW where half of it sits in shade by three o'clock. The assessment is where we map exactly where your shadows fall through the day.
Sun altitudes are the real solar-noon figures for New Lambton's latitude (about 32.9°S): roughly 80° at the summer solstice and 34° at the winter solstice, from the standard solar-geometry method (noon altitude = 90° − latitude + solar declination) used by PVEducation and Geoscience Australia. The diagram shows the seasonal-shadow principle for a north-facing roof, not a rating for your address; your actual shadows are mapped on site. A fuller, sourced explainer is in our solar guide. Nothing here is a price.
Want the physics behind it? Our plain-English guide covers what shading really costs and which way a roof should face, with the panel-level electronics and the sources spelled out.
Most homes around Lambton, Adamstown and Kotara have terracotta or concrete tile roofs. Tiles are completely fine for solar, they just want an installer who mounts to them properly and re-seals as they go, rather than cracking their way across your roof. Older homes here are also usually single-phase, which sets a sensible ceiling on system and export size; that's not a limit to fight, just a fact to design to.
Ausgrid runs the poles and wires across New Lambton and the inner suburbs, and sets the export limit, how much solar you're allowed to send back to the grid. On Ausgrid's network a single-phase home can export up to 10 kW and a three-phase home up to 30 kW (Ausgrid solar connection rules). Since most of the older homes around here are single-phase, the 10 kW figure is the one that applies to the majority of these streets, and it's plenty for the systems most of these roofs suit. We still confirm your phase and your exact limit at the assessment before anything is designed.
Nearby and also covered: Lambton, Adamstown, Adamstown Heights, Kotara, Waratah, Broadmeadow and Georgetown, the whole leafy inner ring shares this same roof story.
That's the whole reason we come and look. Free, no obligation, and we'll tell you straight if your trees mean a smaller system is the smarter one.
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