[RE-wrenches] Wattsun AZ-225 reliability and Production

[Jeff Oldham]

Have watched trackers go from crap to fairly solid designs over the last 30 years and had enough bad experience to vow to never sell one again. I have a very old Wattsun on my home/office that needs repairs about every 12-18 months. I have found few if any vendors in our industry that offers better Customer Service and support then Wattsun. I have an out of warranty repair on its way back to me right now at no cost and a very quick turn-around that they appologized for taking so long! I know the latest "bullet proof" Wattsun design is so far doing very well, but this is their 3rd "bullet-proof" evolution. Consider this - our industry in general states life of a PV system is about 30 years and we all know that we will see reasonable output after double that (who would decommission an array that "only" had 50% output?). Do you think a tracker will still be doing great after 30 years? Not I! In fact I have my money on folks being on their 2nd or 3rd tracker by then. At this point what is your economics looking like? It is toast and in the mean time there were service calls and customer headaches to contend with. I continue to ask myself and my customers - "Why would you chose to introduce moving parts into an elegant energy system that otherwise would have none?!"
I love my tracker, the team at Wattsun and the coolness of tracking the suns path and I will continue to keep mine alive as long as I can still get on a ladder, but I still won't put this  hassle on my customers. For challenging water pumping needs there is often just no way around the impressive benefits of tracking.
I have a 30 y/o Zomeworks for sale, now don't get me going on those....
 
-jeff o


>From the Solar, Wind and Hydro powered office of Jeff Oldham/Regenerative SOLutions
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