James Showalter from Signature Solar and Eric Lundgren from Big Battery
purchased Outback Solar. I have had terrible tech support experiences from
both of those outfits, they tend to conveniently "forget" your engineering
and NEC code compliance support requests when the answer is just simply
"no, not yet UL listed" or "we don't know if that feature works or not."
I'm not sure how these prolific suppliers of cheap crap products with
terrible QC and NIB failure rates intend to compete, but my guess is that
they have control of the big crap overseas product pipeline nozzle and
intend to steer the huge stream of sewage in our direction. Sol-Ark just
imports Deye products and retrofits them with their own upgrades and
firmware. Magnum has vanished, much to my dismay as my own system is Magnum
as are dozens of my customers.

Us off-grid folks still have a couple guys named boB and Robin at Midnite
that still manufacture, sell and support good products. Maybe Morningstar
will up their game into larger inverters. Why are all these shady import
companies based in Texas? Inquiring minds want to know! BTW, I hate
all-in-ones, never had a single good experience, just endless firmware and
comms updates and such simple issues resulting in multiple truck rolls.

I miss Lones Tuss of Outback calling me back on a Friday evening at 7PM and
remotely diagnosing my client's VFX / Mate 3S issues whilst doing his
laundry at home, after I submitted a ticket earlier that day. The client
seriously thought I was pulling a practical joke on him until I put Lones
on speaker.

Strange new world for us off-grid folks. I'll have to stick with the very
few companies left that I trust. Yes, yes, Schneider, but their tech
support is almost impenetrable.

Our strange new off-grid world seems to be destined as crap from Alibaba
and Amazon, and it all smells rather off to me, like the "fresh fish" at a
run-down Safeway in eastern Kansas....

Dan Fink
Owner, Buckville Energy Consulting LLC
IREC Certified Instructor for PV and Small Wind Installation
NABCEP Certified PV System Inspector
NABCEP PV Associate
d <dan.f...@greendustrialtraining.com>anbo...@gmail.com
970-672-4342




On Sat, Jul 20, 2024 at 3:22 PM Jay via RE-wrenches <
re-wrenches@lists.re-wrenches.org> wrote:

> I just checked the OB forums page and there is nothing current.
>
> One thing I found says that the new president of OB is the CEO of Big
> Battery. I don’t know that to be a fact.
> Which is also somehow related to signature solar/ EG4.
>
> My guess is that if/when OB resurfaces it won’t have the same products.
> It’ll just be an old name selling new products and they won’t be dealing
> with old legacy products, warranty or MX or tech support.
>
> I could be way wrong.
>
> But anyone trying to keep a product line going wouldn’t just stop all
> communication for a few months.
>
> Maybe someone who has been an OB distributor might know more about what’s
> up?  I no longer have any of those contacts.
>
> New world, fellow wrenches.
>
> Jay
>
>
>
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