Warranties offered

[Markc]

As most of us will be with REAL we will all come across their Audit programme at some point or other. Ours is coming in early 2011 and by the looks of it they are no more organised than anyone else! Two weeks to reply to a letter dated 30th November which I received on 9th December! Not much time left for that then! Fill in the check list attached......which isn't there and follow the link on our web site that doesn't work. Apart from that all's gone well so far!

One question is What warranties we offer our clients?

So what do we offer? We currently do not have a set procedure (I know we should but we don't!) Is an in house warranty worth anything? If we went bust for example what cover is there then? So what is out there in the way of an insurance backed warranty. I know there is one offered by Real for the protection on taken deposits but what is out there for the protection of the product. Is there a company who offers an insurance backed scheme on the installation of and materials of a PV system? Should we offering extended warranties for the inverters at additional cost for example?

Is anyone using an independent company for warranties?

Be good to know

 

[pcollins]

Good points, I've realised that we don't have one in place either and I'm surprised this wasn't picked up in the MCS process. Given how thorough everything else was it suddenly seems inadequate that I can put a warranty on my quote/invoice etc and not have a procedure for it!

I was under the impression that it was something offered by Napit on notifiable works but I'm not now sure whether this is the case or just a guarantee of workmanship, I'll investigate tomorrow...

I did recently see a supplier offering extendted warranties on SMA inverters for a cost too...

And to be honest, I'm not overly impressed by REAL so far, for my £300ish per year I've seen very little. No promised leaflets for customers, it took several weeks of me badgering them to get my details onto their website and frankly it annoys me to pay this amount of money each year for something which seems to mostly overlap the MCS scheme anyway, unless I'm missing something!

Mini rant over.

Paul

 

[MorganPVI]

2 years for the install process.

Panels 25yr output warranty, inverters 5yr (extendable) both from manu. Pretty sure SMA allow the customer to extend foc (don't quote me)!

 

[Markc]

Found the information from REAL. They have a model warranty to download and substitute your company name on it. Looks like its just your own in house thing so not worth much really.

SMA do offer extended warranty but its not free, 10 years will cost £1000. Got to ask yourself what a inverter will cost in ten years?