A council build in regional Victoria, sized around what the building draws overnight rather than what fits on the roof.
Project · Mansfield, Victoria
E3 Energy designed, supplied and installed a 16.15 kW solar system and a 55.68 kWh FOX ESS battery for the new Mansfield Heritage Museum, a Mansfield Shire Council project completed in June 2026. This is how the job was scoped, installed and commissioned.
The Mansfield Heritage Museum is a new rammed-earth building in the Station Precinct on High Street, Mansfield. It has been a long time coming: the Mansfield Historical Society had been calling for a museum in the town for more than forty years, and a local fundraising appeal that raised $114,000 went on to attract more than $1 million in grant funding to get the building to lock-up stage in 2024. The wider Station Precinct redevelopment, which also covers a dog park, playground, car parks and upgrades to the old Goods Shed, is backed by a $14 million Federal grant administered by Mansfield Shire Council.
The museum is expected to open to the public in late 2026 or early 2027. The energy system needed to be in place before the fit-out and the exhibits went in.
A museum is not a nine-to-five building. Collections need stable temperature and humidity, which means climate control runs through the night and through the weekend, when there is no sun and no staff on site. A solar-only system would have generated well during the day and left the overnight load on the grid.
Mansfield is also a regional site. Outages in country Victoria are more common and last longer than they do in metropolitan Melbourne, and a building holding irreplaceable local artefacts is a poor candidate for an unplanned loss of climate control.
Those two facts drove the design: enough generation to cover the daytime load with margin, and enough storage to carry the building through the night and hold it up during an outage.
| Component | Specification |
|---|---|
| Solar array | 16.15 kW |
| Battery storage | FOX ESS, 55.68 kWh |
| Site | Mansfield Heritage Museum, Mansfield VIC |
| Client | Mansfield Shire Council |
| Completed | 13 June 2026 |
The 55.68 kWh battery is a large bank for a building of this size. That is deliberate. Sizing storage to the overnight load rather than to a package tier is the difference between a battery that runs flat at 2am and one that still has capacity when the sun comes up.
The roof is new Colorbond on a steel frame, which made the mounting straightforward. Rails went down first, set out and fixed to the roof structure rather than to the sheeting alone.
Panels followed across two roof planes, laid out to keep the array clear of the skylights and roof penetrations.
The FOX ESS inverter and battery were mounted on the external wall in the plant area, with the switchboard and isolators run in conduit back to the building’s main board.
The system was handed over to Mansfield Shire Council in June 2026, ahead of the museum’s internal fit-out. Council has since invited E3 Energy to tender for further work in the Mansfield Shire.
Community buildings, council facilities, clubs and small commercial sites tend to share the same shape of problem: a daytime load that solar covers easily, and a base load overnight that solar does nothing for. On sites like these, the battery size is usually what decides whether the numbers work.
We size both from your actual interval data, not from a package menu. If you have twelve months of bills, we can tell you what a system would do before you commit to anything.
It depends on your overnight and weekend load, not on your roof size or your daytime consumption. A site that shuts down at 5pm needs far less storage than one running climate control or refrigeration around the clock. We read it off your interval data.
Yes. The Mansfield Heritage Museum was delivered for Mansfield Shire Council. We hold the accreditations required for public works and can supply the documentation councils need for procurement.
No. Our own CEC-accredited team does the install and the commissioning, and the same team handles service afterwards.
With the right configuration, yes, for the loads you nominate as essential. This matters more in regional Victoria, where outages are longer and more frequent than in metropolitan Melbourne.
