JeepHammer
Solar Wizard
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2019
- Messages
- 1,149
I'm calling BS on the previous post.
Obviously, personal experience and opinion only. Your experience may vary.
You are allowed your opinion.
I work for customers, no companies involved. I do this mostly locally since solar installs/trouble shooting isn't my business, I just have the speciality tools & equipment to do larger scale work from my own solar field.
I don't care what you have, where you got it from, or how you use it. It's more or less a pizza & beer club centered around solar installs & maintiance.
We have 3 big power plants in the area, so no shortage of beer, pizza, fishing buddies with electrical engineering degrees that are interested in solar as a hobby, getting things figured out is pretty easy for them, and they get pizza & beer.
I'm gears & wires. I owned a machine shop, manufacturing plant for larger production machines, so no stranger to everything that can go wrong with mechanical or electrical.
I also own the farm/fishing/hunting/gun range ground these guys hang out on, so I guess I'm the 'Host'? Never had to think about that before...
I also throw a couple solar PV fests a year for people interested. It's a good way to meet like minded people. The closest thing to a sponsorship is another business I'm involved in, hot rod parts, lends us tents for the events.
I drag out all my old gear, show how it used to be done, then we tour the newer stuff (I don't have brand new stuff for long, it's all a work in progress).
The great coyote fire, the collection of rodents & reptiles flash fried/dried crossing terminals, the chewed wiring examples, what lightening damage looks like when you don't have protections, how to wire a combiner box, how to make a solid DC high amp cable, how to minimize strom damage, how to de-ice and clean panels, stuff like that at our events. (We get to show off)
If your dealer/installer/maintiance guy can figure it out, we never hear from you.
If they have issues they can't figure out and owners find out about us, we'll have a look for pizza & beer.
There are plenty of people happy with blue boxes, and I have no issue with that.
I've just not had good results with the products, but admittedly I don't see them unless something is wrong in the first place.
I didn't get much of anything in the way of customer service or troubleshooting help from them.
And there are OPs like this one that are having, have had the same poor to non-existant customer service or there wouldn't be posts like this one...