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Preliminary results from the Inverter and Panel Reliability and Warranty Survey

 

Last week we emailed you requesting your input on a survey SunWiz is running on the Reliability and Warranty service of major inverter and panel brands. We’ve had 45 responses thus far, which is enough to provide preliminary insight, but not nearly enough to say anything conclusive. 

What do you think? Have your say at http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/2036400/Solar-Power-Product-Quality

This graphs below show the average Rating of Warranty Service, for those brands with 3 or more responses thus far. A 5-star rating indicated “no failures”, a 4-star rating indicated “some failures with excellent warranty service”, a 1-star rating indicated “terrible warranty service”, and 0-star indicated no experience with this brand (0-star ratings have been filtered from the study). The thickness of the bars indicate the number of responses – a thicker bar provides a surer rating than thin bars which could have been more influenced by an individual respondent.

Average Service on Panel Warranty

Its too early to say for certain, but LG is leading the brands for best warranty service. Across 5 responses (one from Singapore) LG’s 5-star average rating indicates respondents have had no warranty issues thus far. Those averaging an excellent warranty service include REC, SunPower, and Suntech.
Note that there is insufficient responses thus far to form any conclusions. We’d love to hear your thoughts, particularly on ReneSola, Hanwha Solar One, QSE, and Simax.

Average Service on Inverter Warranty

Its too early to say for certain, but both SMA and Fronius are providing the best warranty service in Australia. There are too few responses to single out any brand of inverter as providing poor service, but the clearly visible trend is for Chinese inverter manufacturers to provide poorer warranty service. This is concerning as preliminary responses also indicate that Chinese inverters are five times more likely to fail within 2 years when compared to non-Chinese inverters.
 
Note that there is insufficient responses thus far to form any conclusions. We’d love to hear your thoughts, particularly on Growatt, KLNE, Sungrow, Ginlong, and MacSolar.

Our Original request:

There’s been a heap of talk recently about poor quality panels and inverters. Without wanting to buy into any unwarranted political witch hunt, it has got me thinking: which solar panels and inverters are the most reliable, and which are the most problematic? 

And hey, things go wrong with even the best equipment. In my mind, what makes a good product great is the knowledge that you’ll be looked after on the odd occasion that you need to make a warranty claim. So I’m interested in hearing of your experiences in making warranty claims for various panels and inverters/

The other thing of interest to me is how long it takes for problems to show up. The bathtub curve predicts that failures occur mostly in infant mortality and wear-out – so I’m interested to characterise whether it is too soon to witness end-of-life failures in Australian PV systems?

If you’d like to have your say in which are the most reliable (and the least reliable) PV panels and inverters, and which brands offer the best and worst warranty support, please take this brief 6-question survey.