OutBack Innovation and Support [RE-wrenches]

Tue May 1 11:54:27 PDT 2007

Todd, Dave, Wrenches - 

First - An apology for my slow response on this list recently - I was 
out of the office for most of the last two weeks for personal reasons 
and yesterday was spent traveling for a customer meeting. I am the only 
person at OutBack able to post on the wrenches list - I will talk with 
Michael about options to address this.  

It is very disappointed to see the way OutBack is being described here 
by a very few, but vocal, individuals.  To have words such as 
"vaporware" and "embellished" thrown back up is simply not a fair or 
accurate way to describe OutBack.  

OutBack has certainly grown - we are now 100+ employee company.  I take 
great pride in the quality of our products, the way we treat our 
employees (full medical, dental, 401K etc.) and that we build our 
products here in the USA - not in china or Eastern Europe as with the 
majority of our competitors. We are growing fast still - which is a very 
challenging situation.  

As far as not being able to talk with the engineers - that is simply not 
true.  Some of us are certainly hard to get ahold of - we are very busy 
- but there is no policy that restricts anyone from talking with anyone. 
 I think some people are simply repeating lies from our competitors who 
are stating this to try and make us look bad.  

As far as innovation and new products - we have many very exciting 
products which will be released this upcoming summer and fall.  Some of 
them will be at MREF.  We have elected to not advertise them months 
ahead of time before they even work or are beta tested - as others are 
doing - and we also are not simply copying other companies products - 
again as many are also doing - we here at OutBack beleive it is only 
worth doing something if we can truely advance the level of technology 
and performance.  Expect to see our new DC monitoring system soon which 
gives so much more information in such a more usuable form as well as 
integrates with the other products for the first true RE "operation 
system".  It will change how systems operate and let you understand what 
the system is doing - not just the battery.  

Developing products like these takes much time - especially if it is 
done right.  We are trying hard to not use the wrenches as guinea pigs  
for our R&D.  Unfortunately, we have recently had to spend much of our 
time dealing with the upcoming switchover to the new UL1741 standard - 
which will be a major event for this group - I look at it as almost the 
Y2K of the grid-tie inverter market in the US - we have spent over 4 
months testing products and revising reports, witho no real world 
improvement to the product - but that is a big part of being a 
manufacturer in a developing industry.  

OutBack is in the market for the long run - and we work hard to be a 
reponsible corporate citizen and participant. I think many on this list 
can attest to this.  

I will be more available for discussing any of the issue online or 
off-list if anyone would like to. I also will address the grid-tie 
inverter ratings issue in a separate email.

Best regards, 

Christopher  

Christopher Freitas
OutBack Power Systems, Inc.
cfreitas @ outbackpower.com  
www.outbackpower.com
Arlington WA USA
Tel 360 435 6030  

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