Door knocking built the Australian solar industry, and the Australian solar industry has spent a decade trying to live down what door knocking did to its reputation. Both halves of that sentence are true, which is why the door to door versus digital question deserves a more honest answer than either side of it usually gives. The canvassing companies will tell you doors are the last honest way to create demand rather than harvest it. The digital agencies, and we are one, will tell you doors are dead. The truth has numbers attached, and some regulation.
This is the comparison for an installer deciding where the next dollar goes: what each channel really costs per sale, where each one still wins, the compliance ground that has shifted under door to door, and what the emergence of AI recommendation does to the whole equation.
The regulatory context you cannot skip
Start here, because it reshapes the channel’s viability by state and segment. Victoria’s Solar Homes rebate program banned door to door sales of rebate eligible products by participating retailers, a ban in force since 2019, which effectively removes cold doors from the largest rebate driven segment of that market. Nationally, unsolicited selling is governed by Australian Consumer Law’s unsolicited consumer agreement rules: permitted contact hours, mandatory cooling off periods, disclosure requirements and a ban on supply during cooling off for larger sales. None of this makes door knocking illegal across the board, but it makes the compliant version slower, more documented and more supervised than the 2015 version, and the penalty environment for getting it wrong has real teeth. Layer on the claims rules that apply to any solar pitch, the same ones covered in CEC and ACCC compliance for solar marketing, and door to door is now a channel for disciplined operators only, which, to be fair, is also true of Google Ads.
What doors still do well
An honest accounting, because the channel persists for reasons. Doors create demand rather than waiting for it: a canvasser puts solar on the agenda of a household that was not searching, which no search based channel can do by definition. Doors concentrate geographically with perfect precision, a crew works the exact streets where you want density, and install density lowers your costs and seeds referrals. Doors put a human in front of the large slice of the population that never fills in a form. And for batteries specifically, a knock on a house with visible panels and no battery is about as targeted as prospecting gets.
The costs are equally real. A compliant two person canvassing operation runs serious weekly money in wages or commissions before a single deal closes, conversion runs on thin percentages of doors to appointments to sales, and the model needs continuous management against the exact behaviours, overclaiming, pressure, rebate urgency theatre, that generated the complaint volumes and the Victorian ban in the first place. Reputationally, the channel carries the industry’s baggage: the customer who loved their door sold system tells nobody, the one who felt pressured tells a consumer affairs reporter.
What digital does better, and where it is weaker
Digital’s core advantage is that it harvests intent that already exists, at measurable cost. A homeowner searching for quotes is days or weeks from a decision, and the channel economics are knowable to the dollar: our published cost per lead benchmarks put paid solar leads in the low hundreds per qualified enquiry depending on city and season, with organic and referral channels well below that. Digital compounds, a ranking page or a review base keeps producing after the spend stops, where a canvassing crew produces nothing the week you stop paying it. And digital leaves an audit trail, which in a compliance heavy category is worth more than convenience.
Digital’s weakness is symmetric: it cannot create demand in a household that is not looking, it fights rising auction prices in peak season for the same searchers every competitor wants, and shared lead versions of it put you in a five way price fight, the dynamic dissected in aggregator leads versus direct. A purely digital installer is structurally a price taker on demand volume: when searches dip, as they do every winter per the seasonal demand pattern, the pipeline dips with them.
The numbers, side by side
Ranges, because operations vary, but honest ones. A well run compliant door program in a permitted market typically lands cost per sale in the high hundreds to low thousands once wages, management and conversion rates wash through, with the wide variance driven by crew quality. Paid digital with direct response typically closes solar sales at total acquisition costs in a similar band in contested metros, lower in less contested regions, with variance driven by season and landing experience. Which is to say: at the median, the channels are closer on cost per sale than either camp admits, and the real differences are elsewhere. Doors scale linearly with headcount and die instantly when stopped; digital compounds, scales with budget until auction economics bite, and persists. Doors win attention you did not have; digital wins trust you can verify. Doors are a sales culture problem to manage; digital is a measurement problem to manage. An installer should choose based on which problem their business is actually good at managing.
The AI layer changes the ending
Here is the part neither traditional camp has priced in. A growing share of Australian solar buyers now ask AI assistants who to use, and the assistants answer with named shortlists built from published, verifiable evidence: accreditation registers, reviews, comparison profiles and installers’ own content, the machinery we measured in the SolarQuotes analysis and the accreditation check study.
This cuts against doors in a specific way: the door sold customer increasingly goes inside and asks an assistant about the company whose rep is on the porch. If the assistant has never heard of you, or worse, surfaces complaint threads, the knock unravels. Every door program now needs the digital trust layer behind it just to hold its own conversions. And it strengthens the compounding argument for digital: reviews, case studies and register alignment now pay twice, once in search and again in AI answers. The channels have stopped being alternatives. Doors without digital trust is a leaky bucket; digital without any demand creation is a ceiling. The installers winning in 2026 run intent harvesting and trust infrastructure as the permanent base, and treat doors, where permitted and disciplined, as a targeted overlay for density plays and battery upgrades, not as the engine.
The hybrid in practice: a season of both
Because the channels have become complements rather than alternatives, the useful picture is what a combined season actually looks like for an installer running both properly.
The digital base runs year round and does not flex much: the Google profile and review routine, the pricing and project pages, the register alignment, a modest always on search presence that scales up toward the spring peak per the seasonal pattern, and the monthly AI prompt panel quietly recording whether the trust layer is deepening. This base is what every other activity converts against, and its costs are mostly fixed, which is what makes the flexible spend decisions rational.
The doors overlay, where compliant, runs as campaigns rather than a standing operation. A four to six week push into two or three chosen suburbs where you already have install density, timed either to shoulder season when digital demand is soft and crews have quoting capacity, or behind a local trigger, a new estate maturing past its builder warranty period, a feed in tariff change, a visible cluster of recent installs to point at. The crew leads with the local proof, we did the black roof on Wilson Street, because proximity is the one persuasive asset doors have that no other channel can use. Every conversation ends with something that survives the doorstep: a card pointing at the suburb’s case study page, because you built one, and the knowledge that when the household checks you online that evening, and they will, the reviews, the register entries and the published pricing all confirm the person who knocked.
Measured this way, the door campaign stops being a separate religion and becomes a line item you can compare: cost per sale against the same quarter’s digital cost per sale, with the honest attribution note that some door attributed sales were incubated by the digital base and some digital enquiries were seeded by the knock. Installers who run this configuration for a full year generally arrive at the same allocation: the substantial majority of budget in the compounding base, a tactical minority in overlays, reviewed seasonally. Which is, perhaps disappointingly, where most old arguments end: not with a winner, but with a ratio, and a review date in the calendar for revisiting it.
A decision framework in four questions
Which states and segments are you selling into? Victoria’s rebate segment rules out cold doors for participating retailers; other markets permit compliant operations. Check the current rules for each state you work before costing anything.
Can you genuinely manage a sales floor? Doors are a people management business attached to solar. If your strength is operations and install quality, buying demand digitally usually fits the business you actually run.
Is your trust layer solid? Reviews above the mid hundreds, aligned register entries, real case studies. If not, fix that before either channel, because it raises the conversion of both, per how installers win without being cheapest.
Do you need density or volume? Doors build streets; digital builds pipelines. A regional installer consolidating three suburbs has a doors case a metro volume player does not.
Frequently asked questions
Is door to door solar selling legal in Australia?
Broadly yes with significant exceptions and conditions. Victoria’s Solar Homes program has banned door to door sales of rebate eligible products by participating retailers since 2019, and everywhere else unsolicited sales must follow Australian Consumer Law rules on contact hours, disclosure and cooling off periods. Compliant operations exist; casual ones accumulate liability.
What does door knocking cost per solar sale compared to digital?
At the median they are closer than partisans admit: both typically land in the high hundreds to low thousands per closed residential sale once true costs wash through, with doors varying on crew quality and digital varying on season and city. The bigger differences are structural: doors stop producing the day you stop paying, digital assets compound and persist.
Does door knocking still work for batteries?
It is arguably the channel’s best remaining use case where permitted: houses with visible panels and no battery are a perfectly targeted list, and the conversation is an upgrade rather than a cold concept. The same targeting is available at near zero cost to installers who email their own installed base first, which is the higher margin version of the same idea.
Why do AI recommendations matter to a door sales operation?
Because the customer checks. The porch conversation now routinely continues inside with an assistant being asked about your company, and assistants answer from registers, reviews and published content. A door program without a strong digital trust layer watches its conversion leak to that check, which we have measured assistants running against accreditation registers by name.
Should a new installer start with doors or digital?
Digital foundation first in almost every case: Google profile, reviews, register alignment, a real website with pricing and projects. It costs less than a single month of canvassing wages and every later channel converts better on top of it. Add demand creation, doors included where compliant, once the trust layer stops leaking.
Can the two channels run together?
That is the winning configuration where doors are permitted: digital as the permanent compounding base for intent and trust, doors as a disciplined overlay for suburb density and battery upgrades. The failure configuration is doors as the engine with no digital trust behind it, which converts worse every year as buyers verify more.
