The blog that we posted on the warranty claim with Enphase received some attention—from Enphase. The director of customer support read the SolarTown blog on the warranty claim on the Enphase Envoy and wrote to us directly: “It sounds like someone may still have an unresolved issue, which I would personally like the opportunity to escalate to resolution… I would be happy to intervene and fix the situation.” And true to his word, Enphase replaced the Envoy that wasn’t working. Issue resolved and our hours on the phone were behind us. Enphase will need to continue to support its customer relations folks if it wants to hold onto its leadership role in the inverter market. Enphase is also reportedly considering offering a longer warranty than the current 15 years that it currently offers. That would assure consumers that the microinverters will work reliably for almost as long as the 20-25 years that the solar modules are expected to generate electricity. The warranty is only as good as the company that is standing behind its products. We hope that the intervention in the warranty claim that we had better represents the company’s customer service approach than what we experienced initially. That could keep Enphase in the leadership position for some time to come.
Posts Tagged ‘central inverters’
Enphase Steps up to the Plate on Warranty Claim
Tuesday, April 26th, 2011Enphase Microinverter Warranty Claim Causes Heartburn
Monday, March 21st, 2011We should say right up front that we generally have a bias in favor of microinverters. Most of the solar energy systems that we sell at SolarTown are sold with microinverters rather than central inverters. We have explained in our learning article explaining inverters and micro inverters why generally we favor microinverters in the residential solar market. Our recommendation, however, may be tempered by our recent experience dealing with customer care of the leading microinverter manufacturer, Enphase. Microinverters have quickly garnered acceptance especially for solar installations on homes. Although we expect some major competition starting this year, Enphase is undoubtedly the leader of this fast expanding market, and as of this writing, is the only microinverter we carry at SolarTown. We may have not been as sensitive to the reliability issue of microinverters, or particularly the Enphase microinverter, until one of the Enphase parts failed on one of our customer’s installations. The part that failed was the Enphase Envoy, which is, according to Enphase, the “communications gateway” for the solar energy system. It basically monitors the performance of the system.