Warranty and support: who covers what, and for how long

The word "warranty" is used for three unrelated things in a solar quotation, and conflating them is how buyers end up believing they are covered for something nobody has agreed to cover. They are worth separating before anything else.

1. The manufacturer warranty — the panel, inverter or battery maker guaranteeing their own product. This is the substantial one, and it is not given by me.
2. The workmanship warranty — whether the installation itself was done correctly. This is mine.
3. After-sales support — whether anyone answers the phone, diagnoses the fault and chases the claim. Also mine, and the one most often promised in a single line with nothing behind it.

1. What the manufacturer covers

These terms come from the manufacturers rather than from me, they vary by product, and the actual documents for your equipment are handed to you at commissioning. The figures below are typical of the tier-one equipment I specify and should be checked against your own paperwork rather than taken from a web page.

Two distinctions in that table matter more than the numbers. A product warranty covers the item failing; a performance warranty covers it degrading faster than specified while still working, which is a different and slower failure. And on storage, a warranty expressed in years tells you very little — the meaningful figure is rated cycles at a stated depth of discharge, because that is what determines whether the bank reaches end of life in year six or year twelve.

2. What I cover: the installation itself

If something was installed wrongly, I come back and put it right. That covers the work I am personally on site for because it decides whether a system survives twenty years: structure anchoring, roof penetration and waterproofing, DC termination, and earthing.

Those four are also, not coincidentally, the defects that are invisible on handover and expensive later. A leak at a penetration shows up in the first serious monsoon; an under-torqued DC termination shows up as heat long before it shows up as a fault. They are the reason I attend those stages rather than sending a crew and reading a report.

3. Support: what happens when you call

Generation checks, fault diagnosis and manufacturer warranty claims are included on projects I deliver rather than sold afterwards as a service contract, and the person who answers is the engineer who designed and commissioned your system. The after-sales page sets out the scope in full.

I keep the warranty register with every expiry date on it and raise claims with the manufacturer on your behalf. That administrative half is worth more than it sounds: most owners will not chase a manufacturer claim themselves, and a warranty nobody claims is indistinguishable from no warranty at all. A plant with a degrading string in year eleven is in a very different position from the same plant in year thirteen.

Why there is no response-time guarantee on this page

I do not publish a guaranteed response time in hours, and the reason is the same one that governs everything else here. I am one engineer. A number I could not honour during a week spent commissioning a plant in Vehari would be worse than no commitment, because you would have chosen on the strength of it.

What I do instead is tell you honestly, before you commit, what my availability realistically looks like and what happens when I am on another site. If you need a guaranteed emergency response with a standby rota behind it, you need a company structured to provide one — and you should have it rather than a promise from me that would not survive a bad week.

What is not covered by anyone

Stated plainly, because a support page that lists only what is included is a brochure.

• Damage from storms, lightning strikes, flooding or other events outside anyone's control. This is an insurance question, and it is worth confirming your property policy covers a roof-mounted array — many do not by default.
• Damage caused by work carried out by others after commissioning. If another contractor has been on the roof, that changes what I can stand behind.
• Gradual output loss from soiling. That is maintenance rather than a fault, and it is the most common reason an owner believes their system is failing when it is merely dirty.
• Consequential losses — lost production or spoiled stock during an outage. Neither the manufacturers nor I cover these, which is precisely why a genuine outage cost is an argument for storage rather than something to be insured against by warranty.
• Equipment that has reached the end of its warranted life. An inverter failing outside its term is a replacement decision, and I will tell you honestly whether replacing that unit or reconfiguring the plant is the better call at that point.

Making a claim

1. Call or message me with what you are seeing — a generation figure that looks wrong, an error on the inverter display, or a physical observation.
2. Where the monitoring supports it, diagnosis starts remotely. Distinguishing a soiled array from a failed string is usually possible from the data without anyone driving anywhere.
3. If it needs a site visit, I attend. Establishing whether this is a maintenance issue, a workmanship defect or an equipment failure decides who is responsible for it.
4. Where it is an equipment failure inside warranty, I raise the claim with the manufacturer and follow it through, using the register and the original invoices from your handover pack.
5. Where it is workmanship, I put it right.