Enphase Steps up to the Plate on Warranty Claim

The blog that we posted on the warranty claim with Enphase received some attention—from Enphase.  The director of customer support read the SolarTown blog on the warranty claim on the Enphase Envoy and wrote to us directly: “It sounds like someone may still have an unresolved issue, which I would personally like the opportunity to escalate to resolution… I would be happy to intervene and fix the situation.”  And true to his word, Enphase replaced the Envoy that wasn’t working. Issue resolved and our hours on the phone were behind us. Enphase will need to continue to support its customer relations folks if it wants to hold onto its leadership role in the inverter market.

Barely five years old, Enphase only launched its microinverter product in 2008 but has shipped over 500,000 microinverters. Gaining this huge traction in the market has made Enphase the target of both microinverter competitors like Solar Bridge Technologies in Texas and Enecys in the UK, and Enphase’s center inverter nemisis SMA. These would-be competitors can’t wait for Enphase to slip up.

Enphase is responding by trying to stay ahead in the technology and entering new markets. Most microinverters are used on residential applications. If you are installing a solar array on your home, chances are that the installer may have told you about the advantages and disadvantages of microinverters. Now Enphase is also considering entering the commercial market, offering higher voltage microinverters.

According to news reports, Enphase is launching a new series of products later this year that will compete on efficiency, cost and reliability. Enphase’s third generation of microinverters are designed to achieve an average efficiency of 96 percent, one percentage point better than the current microinverter on the market.

On cost, Enphase is innovating a new installation method to bring down the cost of installation—which will offset the approximate 15% higher cost of microinverters compared to central inverters. Enphase will supply cables with built-in connections and clips to pin the cables to the mounts located on the underside of the solar modules.

Enphase is also reportedly considering offering a longer warranty than the current 15 years that it currently offers. That would assure consumers that the microinverters will work reliably for almost as long as the 20-25 years that the solar modules are expected to generate electricity. The warranty is only as good as the company that is standing behind its products.  We hope that the intervention in the warranty claim that we had better represents the company’s customer service approach than what we experienced initially. That could keep Enphase in the leadership position for some time to come.