Are Growatt Inverters Any Good? Here’s An Installer’s Opinion

Growatt Are Growing Up. About Time.

Here’s my review of Growatt inverters: I’ve always thought they were rubbish. Aside from the one in the cover image that has clocked up 11 years and is still plugging away to this day.

Want to know why I have this opinion? Pull up a chair, and I’ll start at the beginning.

Years ago, I was setting out selling and installing solar on my own, getting qualified help where I needed it and otherwise running a one-man minnow of an operation. I never advertised and never had to; people would ring me up because I’d been to their friend’s place or bought a home brew thermostat from their wife’s shop. The customers paid up front for the expensive equipment, and I claimed the STC payment after it was done. Things went well, and I never had a warranty call back despite using what turned out to be less-than-stellar Simax solar panels.

There was this one bloke, though, a roofer and former work colleague. He knocked down and built a brand new house in a nice up-and-coming / trending-to-swank inner suburb, begging that he needed 10kW but couldn’t afford the price. Forty panels was a big system, and I weakened. I told him that instead of the two SMA Sunny Boy TL5000 inverters I had used everywhere, I could get him a couple of Growatt inverters, and they were half the price… which he went for. Bewdy.

So we put a system on, and all went swimmingly. They were pleased with 40kWh of solar energy on the first day, but it only lasted three weeks. Then one of the two Growatt inverters died. Odd, I thought, but not out of the question, you might have an early life failure. Oh well, I went back with another unit, and what came out of the “new” inverter box was a used warranty unit. It turns out they refurbished them.

Three weeks later, I would have to return and diagnose the other inverter as dead. This one had such a significant internal haemorrhage that it took out the main circuit breaker causing the whole house to black out. The customer was -pissed- and so was I. Now we had both of the original units replaced with warranty ones, and I was hoping that whatever the issue was, we had overcome it.

26/7/13. Two 5kW inverters with twenty panels each. She was a big system back when 250w and 1 x 1.6 metres was the standard panel size.

From Growatts to Nowatts

So this model of single input 5kW machine was indeed a lemon, in my experience. The evidence included the faded finish on the heat sink of the subsequent warranty units. When it’s cheap, black anodising quickly bleaches to brown in the sun.

When both the original units failed, I was sus, and when by June and November, both the replacements failed, I rang the wholesaler in disgust. After four failures in 16 months, I could not afford the reputational damage and told them it was their problem now. I would not be replacing the replacements, and I would never buy another Growatt, not least because I never got a dollar for the eight site visits.

What are Growatts like in 2023?

And despite working for various people, I’ve never had to dirty my hands on another Growatt. Everyone else had used a different brand of snot for the budget-conscious customers, so I’ve had nothing much to gauge them on other than the people you meet, like one of my best mates, who’s had a 4.2kW GroWatt on his house humming away ceaselessly for ten years. And other industry operatives I’ve come to respect, ones who aren’t prone to hyperbole, who say they find the modern Growies are pretty solid, hundreds installed, just a handful of failures.

So I began to look into them as I researched a budget battery article. They must be better by now, after so many years? Surely if everyone had suffered the kind of crap I did, they would have gone broke years ago? It certainly seemed they were on the up if they had paid the money to be a major sponsor of All Energy conference… otherwise known as Solar Christmas.

The thing is, I couldn’t find the warranty details on the Growatt battery. Everyone else in the country had pages of stuff on PDFs that I had to plough through. Cycle life, temperatures, test procedures, internet connectivity exclusions, depth of discharge, megawatt hours throughput. All this detail I wish someone would standardise a test procedure for all so that we could reliably compare products.

Well, GroWatt was having none of it. They just didn’t publish it, and what they did publish was some crap about the warranty being subject to the laws of Shenzen, China. Ummm, not in this country they’re not; we’ve got consumer law up the whazoo.

In an age where companies live and die by social media, to this day, the GroWatt Australia Facebook page hasn’t been updated since 2018. It does feature some terrible reviews with 1-star ratings and an autoresponder that replies to your chat, and nothing happens thereafter.  So I rang the three(?) mobile numbers they list on the website for support, which didn’t answer. The only line that did pick up was the 1800 number and they couldn’t help other than to give me an email address. So I reached out again to ask for some help and, well, I’ll let you judge the tone, but what I was picking up was a distinct lack of interest.

I’m Happy To Be Proven Wrong

Scrolling through the happy news of a New South Wales election, I found a hapless punter asking for feedback on the three solar power systems he had listed, in a post to one of the numerous social solar sites I’ve had the misfortune to join. For this particular page, they do have a self-declared safe space for anti-vaxers and GroWatt, while a few other members troll with responses about #nowatt. It’s an eclectic mix, but I contributed my 5 cents in saying that from the decidedly budget lineup, the Sungrow/Jinko option outlined was good, and, in my opinion, the rest was junk.

Then there was the reply. A valiant defender of GroWatt’s good name, and as the banter about defamation and the screenshots rolled out I found myself in conversation with actual company representatives, people who had skin in GroWatt’s game. The best part about this was that one of them clarified that GroWatt pay $150 toward service calls on warranty units and he would look into my case personally. Wow.

The other bloke explained that GroWatt Australia was now migrating to a new local website. (Which would have been handy to know about in January when I was chasing things up) He said it was a shame I didn’t find the details, but he sent me the (nearly) direct link to the battery warranty documents, and then he screenshotted them all for me too. What service!

Customer Service Is So Important

After so many years of telling everyone I could about how bad my experience was with GroWatt, this new level of concern from Growatt in Australia has come as a revelation. The cynic in me says that it’s because SolarQuotes is held in high regard, and it’s important to have your public relations right with those with industry credibility. However, the optimist in me says they have indeed “taken on the advice” and lifted their game.

Time will tell, of course, but knowing that Australians love nothing more than a cheap solar system, it bodes well that one of the biggest players in the budget end of the market is getting their ducks lined up properly. In reality, it’s well overdue, and I still scratch my head as to how lean the operation must be, to potentially expose themselves to considerable consumer grief by not ticking all the boxes.

I’m not going to rush out and put one on my house just yet, but if Growatt can make a decent product and back it with a decent warranty, one that pays for decent service too, then that gets more solar on rooftops and I’ll be pleased.

What’s your experience with old and recent Growatt inverters, batteries and customer service? Let me know in the comments.

Original Source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/are-growatt-inverters-any-good-heres-an-installers-opinion/