We have owned an Outback Radian and Mate3 as part off our off-grid system for about two years now.
We have owned other brand name inverters, dating back about twelve years.
Dealing with the support services of different companies has yielded different results. The question is; “what should be reasonably expected from an inverter as far as performance, reliability and service/warrantied parts?”
Response time is an important factor when something goes wrong with an off-grid system, for obvious reasons. Outback’s typical response time to an email has been of one week or more, sometimes having to write a second email before getting a response. Now everything is relative to perspective so I will just say, is this response time reasonable?
Calling over the phone usually gets somewhat of a quicker response, if one can afford waiting by the phone awhile or leaving messages and trying to play phone tag. If calling more than once about something, it sometimes becomes difficult trying to address the same issue over again when not speaking to the same person, specially when the responses can diverge from one person to the next. We delt with Magnum in the past and, for the most part, the person was the same and the answers were quick and without hesitation, it felt like they knew right away without having to look it up. Now again, is the expectation of getting answers like that too high? Or should we consider that its ok if support staff makes us wait when they look up their manuals just like we do?
When it comes to component failure or parts replacement it is hard to compare since we never had to replace anything until we owned an Outback. Up until now, there have been issues with both the Mate3 and the Radian. Replacement parts were supplied but all those parts had signs of having been refurbished even if the components were under warranty. Now again, should one expect more?
The Radian/Mate3 offers great features but it definitely appears to come with a requirement to have to “not mind” dealing with the above mentioned issues. It would be interesting to find out about the results of an in depth study regarding the reliability factor and Customer satisfaction when it comes to Outback’s Radian series versus other brand names.