Across the country today, about 5,000 people will decide what to do about a dying hot water system, a broken heater, or a car that's finally had it (shout-out to my 2002 Toyota Avalon - gone, but never forgotten).

Most won't think of it as a climate decision. But according to Rewiring Australia's modelling, the machines in our homes and driveways account for more than 38% of national emissions.

The non-profit behind that number has spent years working out what happens when real houses go electric. Last month, it launched a free tool, built with Google AI, to share that advice with everyone at once. I spoke to its CEO, Francis Vierboom.

^{TDA Team Note: We made this edition with Google. We researched and wrote everything below, and we flag Rewiring Australia's figures as theirs every time they appear.}

It comes down to four or five familiar machines: the car in the driveway, the hot water system, the heater, the cooktop. I asked Francis whether that lens makes the problem easier or harder. He said both.

"It's a cultural scale problem," he said. "This is about people learning and understanding a kind of new reality, that when one day your hot water system breaks, it's really important to have in the back of your mind, like, 'Okay, if I've got a choice here, then electric is the choice I should make.'"

I particularly liked Francis’ food-related analogy to demonstrate cultural change: “We've all worked out that vegetables are probably a better choice than sugary foods, right?”

Francis insists it’s not about “ripping out an appliance that works” - you wait until it breaks, then you electrify. The broken-thing crew is sizeable: according to Rewiring Australia, about 5,000 Australians replace a gas appliance or buy a car every single day. "Basically, the question facing Australia for climate action is, like, how many of those 5,000 decisions are gonna go the way of an electric machine?"

Rewiring Australia started in Thirroul, just south of Sydney, where Francis was at home with his second kid after years of running a software company. In 2022, the inventor Saul Griffith moved to the same suburb, fresh from a book arguing that swapping the machines in our homes is the easy part of climate action, and that the country needed a few communities to prove it.

So the pair, with a growing group of neighbours, set out to make their postcode Australia's first all-electric suburb. About 1,500 of the roughly 4,500 households signed up. "I said to Saul, all right. We've got too many people signed up now. You better give me a job."

It became Electrify 2515, Australia's first community-led electrification pilot. They're not fully electrified yet, but they're on their way. The houses were never the point: Rewiring wanted the messy stuff, like what this costs different kinds of homes, and what a grid does when a whole street switches at once.

Advising every household in Australia hit an obvious problem. One-on-one conversations that work at community level don't scale.

"We can't be there for every one of them," Francis said. A handful of experts can talk a few hundred households through their switchboards. Australia has about 11 million homes.

They'd tried the obvious fixes. "You can write a PDF that's about 90 pages long that answers everyone's questions," he said, and people had built forms and guides, but "frankly, they weren't an engaging user experience".

I asked why they'd gone to AI rather than building a calculator years ago.

"The unfortunate answer to that, Sam, is there is a calculator on our website, and it just doesn't get used that much."

Enter Electric Saul: years of knowledge and experience, bundled into a chatbot that we can all use to talk about our current household dynamics, and the if/how/when/where of electrification. 

You give it your postcode, say whether you own or rent, and tell it what you've got: the heating, the hot water, the cooktop, whether there's solar or a battery, what's in the driveway. Then it stops asking and starts talking.

What comes back is a ranked next step, rough costs and savings, and the rebates where you live. It's loaded with Rewiring's research and Saul Griffith's writing, hence the name. It's free, and Francis makes a point of that: most decent electrification advice sits on sites that want to sell you something. 

His pitch for it is unglamorous. It's meant to feel like "having a chat with your friend at the pub about your energy question… and sometimes, the answer is not to buy something."

Francis acknowledged the main barrier is cost. A heat pump is about four times more efficient than a gas or old-school electric hot water system, he said, but costs a fair bit more.

He argues bill savings can cover the repayments. "If cash is the issue, then you can still make it a positive upgrade for your wallet on the first day."

That's easier in some states than others. Since June, the NSW Home Energy Saver program has offered zero-interest loans up to $15,000 over 10 years, for households earning under $210,000, covering solar, batteries, insulation and switchboards (not cars).

Our audience has told us, repeatedly, that they're uneasy about the environmental cost of AI. So I put it to Francis: this is a tool for cutting energy use, and it does use some energy to run.

He took it seriously, though he's not neutral and the numbers are Rewiring's own. Their calculation, he said, is that a chat with Electric Saul is close to "one cup of tea worth of water boiling", and that solar on five people's roofs would generate enough over its lifetime to power about 200,000 conversations. He was upfront that "there's all kinds of different estimates".

What he wouldn't concede is that using less is enough. "We can't efficiency our way to net zero," he said. Efficiency helps, he said, but "using 50% of the fossil fuels that you were using before means you're still using fossil fuels".

Close to a third of Australian households, including mine, rent. Renters don't own the hot water system, and often can’t plug an EV in when they get home from work. Francis rents too, and his answer was political rather than practical.

In Victoria, minimum energy efficiency standards phase in from 1 March 2027, requiring landlords to replace failed gas heating and hot water with electric. Those rules are already law, but energy is central to the state election on 28 November, and Francis believes they're "a bit at risk" of being torn down. In NSW, a similar scheme is only at the consultation stage.

So part of what the tool does, if you are a renter unable (in its view) to make changes to your building, is tell people when it's "a great moment to get in contact with your local politician". Francis says he's struck by how well represented big energy companies are in parliament, and thinks it could use more voices from people.

Climate action, Francis said, is taking one moment and making it work for the long run, so you're not "locking in another 20-year subscription to fossil fuels by adding another car". Buy the electric one, and you lock in the savings for the same stretch.

He was careful not to oversell it ("I'm not here to say every individual action is gonna change the weather”), but reminded me that about 5,000 of those moments are happening today. Francis hopes his Electric Saul gets used in a few of them.

Listen to the full conversation with Francis on Spotify here or Apple Podcasts here.

Your kitchen and garage could be costing you thousands, and more than a third of Australia's emissions come from how we use them.


Rewiring Australia built Electric Saul - a free tool powered by Google AI, that acts like a trusted mate at the pub. It offers tailored advice on what to upgrade, what rebates you're owed, and what you'll save, cutting through the overwhelm of wiring, sizing and finance. With 5,000 of these decisions made across Australia daily, the timing's never been better.


More's possible with Google AI.