Eliminate Solar offset

We’ve got a standalone inverter from sunedge, and they’ve got a warranty extension program I’m constantly reminding myself I need to sign up for. ~$350 for a 20yr warranty on a $6000 inverter isn’t so bad…provided they’re not dirt cheap in 20 years which they may very well be.

I would skip the extended warranty, they are typically a win only for the people selling them. To be worthwhile you would have to buy one on every item you own as you have no clue what will break. If you buy one on your inverter then your washing machine will die, while if you buy one for the washer then it will likely be the TV that dies. You are better off to buy none and just fund repairs on what you don’t spend on these warranties. Further, the costs of these things drop by huge amounts over time. My Sunnyboy inverters came with only a five year warranty 12 years ago. You could have extended it to 10 years but I think the price for that extension was close to $1,000 if I recall correctly. I just bought the Fronious 7500 watt inverter to replace two Sunnyboy 2500 inverters that died. My cost for the Fronious was $1,100. So, by not buying four extended warranties which would have cost me $4,000 and only taken me to 10 years I spent nothing, got 12 years life, and then spent only 25% as much to replace two and have capacity to add the strings from the third 2500 unit when it eventually dies. Oh, and the new one comes with at least 10 years.

[quote=“NJHaley, post:21, topic:347”]
I need to sign up for. ~$350 for a 20yr warranty on a $6000 inverter[/quote]

A 5% warranty on anything/year is generally a good deal for most consumer items. 10%/year is when it starts to get questionable and 15%/year is much too high. Also, one has to consider likely hood of failure. So if you have a child using your $2,000 laptop, or running around your big screen TV, take the warranty and make sure you have accidental coverage.

But the warranty of an industrial product, which the string inverter would be one, you need to look at some aspects.

  1. Is it in a location that might cause an early failure? E.g. outside mounting vs inside garage, or area subject to flooding etc.
  2. Does the warranty take care of early, infant-mortality failures? I would say at least 1 year for a string inverter.
  3. What is the initial warranty, and how long does the extended warranty extend it to?
  4. Is the cost no more than, say 2%/year extended? I’d say once you hit 20 years, don’t worry about it.
  5. Is the company going to be here till the end of your warranty period?

My gut feeling says $350 (5.8%) of the cost is not alot to give you some peace of mine.

Generally I’d agree - I never buy extended warranties on anything. This is a little more tempting to me for whatever reason. The standard warranty goes 12yrs, so the extended gets you another 8yrs, just about reaching the life expectancy of the system…for $303 it turns out. I’m really tempted to go for this one rather than the $500 to net 25 years, because I do really feel like in 20-25yrs there’ll be something better out there for much much cheaper (like @miracj is suggesting), money will be better spent on a new system.

We’ll still have the panels in 20yrs, though. And just to clarify - that’s a one shot $303 that gets you an extension from 12 years to 20 years, and as SolarEdge is one of the leading inverter producers around the world, I think it’s a pretty good bet they’ll be around to honor it.

Our inverter is outside, East facing and gets a fair amount of sun (In AZ that’s no trivial matter). My concern really is that it’s going to take some abuse which will almost certainly lead to failure (maybe before the primary warranty?). The $300 is something I don’t mind paying for some piece of mind, otherwise we’d probably use it to help pay down the loan a little - it’s coming from our solar tax credit.

If it gives you peace of mind then maybe a good investment, but financial I don’t agree. You are sinking $300 into something that has zero possible payoff for at least 12 years. That is a long time for a high tech product. You might not even be living there in 12 years, you never know. As I said previously, unless you insure everything I don’t think it makes sense to pick and choose certain things as if you do you are assuring costs but not assuring coverage. I rather just self insure everything and let the chips fall where they may.

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I’ll think on it a little more :slight_smile: I have another 6 or 8 months to decide, luckily.

Our house, knock wood, hasn’t had any electrical problems - only plumbing (the plumbers I’m convinced were second rate). Maybe that’s a sign :wink:

You originally said Sunedge, not Solaredge, which confused me. Solaredge definitely makes a quality power optimizer (for those that don’t know, DC to DC conversion - very efficient, less failures, that then gets final conversion at a central inverter).

If that is what you have, their Central inverters have a similar failure rate as others based on what I have read, which is more typically 10 years (and sometimes faster). So spending less than $40/year for the extended warranty does make “Sense” :slight_smile: for your situation, particularly if the inverter is being baked by the Arizona sun.

P.S. If you can shade your inverter, with a tree or something else, might make it last longer.

SolarEdge, sunedge, it’s all blending together O_O It’s probably just that I was typing on my phone on my walk to work so wasn’t paying close attention :slight_smile:

It’s in a difficult spot to put shade, unfortunately. We have a baby prickly pear cactus growing up in front of it, but it’s taking its sweet time…And the javelinas keep eating our cactus so it may never get tall enough.

My solar panels are installed on a utility building and feed into a subpanel. Sense measures solar production were the sub panel feeds into the main panel. The distance to the utility building is to far for the micro inverters to report production reliably to the solar controller, so I installed the controller and a Wi-Fi extender in the utility building. As a result my night time solar production is not negligible. It shows up as 67W all night long. This is the combined usage of the controller and Wi-Fi extender.It would be nice to shift the after dark numbers as usage to the “Always On” bubble.
I am not concerned with accurately measuring my solar production. My solar controller provides this information to me . I am however interested in accurately measuring my daily electricity usage without the numbers being tainted by phantom solar production at night that is actually usage.

nest9020

I just installed Sense a few days ago and also have the Solar bubble at night. Mine shows 12w and I also have micro inverters that are powered by the panels, so this should be ZERO.

I had another monitor system before Sense, and the 12w was called a phantom load, which gets into another subject entirely.

the 12W seems pretty constant, so I feel if I was able to calibrate it to zero, the bubble would not show at night. Thanks.