[RE-wrenches] Equipment failures

Dana dana at solarwork.com
Tue May 7 12:44:20 PDT 2013


In light of Bob O's post  - after now 25 years of design & installation(OMG)
I have been guinea pigged one time too many with New products. I second
BobO's post.

 

I remember so clearly sitting in a presentation by a new inverter
manufacturer that repeatedly spoke of MTTF, "mean time to failure" or was
it, "Time to a mean failure?"[he did not have any real data so this was all
he could speak on] - and their product was in the 100+ year MTTF category I
had a hard time keeping my mouth shut as he prattled on.  Yet here we are
with failures on products that were touted as 30+ years going south.

 

In light of solid testing and really building a solid industry with lots of
certification and NEC & UL all over the place and PV Manu's dropping out of
business. 

Where is a reality test that the gear will really deliver with the stated
warranty? 

We are certifying the installer for safety, knowledge, installation practice
and materials selection, BUT there is nothing to protect the consumer from a
fraud that is 2 parts. 1 - Will the Manu. still be in business henceforth
will the warranty be real? And 2 - Is the warranty stated realistic or just
a speculative MTTF pile of hooey?

 

Again the reality is that we as the seller, recommender, and installer of
said equipment is the one whose reputation and business longevity is
greatest effected by equipment failures.

I personally have a min. of a 5 year good reliability reports requirement
before I will jump on someone's band wagon with one the exception of one
company - Outback power. I have seen charge controllers catch on fire, melt
down & it was a wonderful thing that the wall was concrete.

 

What would it take to have UL really time test the reliability of products?
Or should someone else do this? Is this realistic?

 

____________________________________________________________________________

Dana Orzel 

Great Solar Works, Inc -  NABCEP # 051112-136

dana at solarwork.com  - www.solarwork.com 

PLEASE ADD & NOTE NEW CELL - C - 208.721.7003             

O - 970.626.5253    F - 970.626.4140   

"Responsible Technologies for Responsible People since 1988"  

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.re-wrenches.org/pipermail/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org/attachments/20130507/805a2405/attachment-0002.html>


More information about the RE-wrenches mailing list