The Enshittification of Solar
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
This is scary. I installed PV and solar in my home in 2019, and we had the chance of getting a cheaper inverter from Chinese Solis, or getting a better one from Austrian Fronius. We ended up getting Fronius because its quality was waaaay higher than the Chinese counterpart. Some of our friends also installed solar at their home and chose the Chinese inverters.
Fronius is an awesome company. We had issues connecting a second inverter to our home, and they helped us install it. We also had some issues with the modbus communication and the inverters not working properly at night, and they helped us diagnose and solve the problem.
Their inverters are top quality, and if you're in Brazil, I highly recommend them. The best inverters out there, very good quality, never had ANY major issues since their installation in 2019 - we have a Fronius 5 and a Fronius 3.
Meanwhile, our friends with Solis or other Chinese inverters, after a year they had issues that: the inverter stopped producing energy because they fried, or they simply stopped showing statistics and then, without an electricity meter that measures how much you're generating, you'd have no clue if your inverter is working as expected.
Fronius didn't disappoint us and a year later we were so happy we decided to spend a bit more for the better quality. As far as I remember, we didn't even need to register for a Fronius account - the inverter works locally and everything can be accessed locally.
For Solis, you do need to register for a Solis account, and all of your production data is sent to their server in China. And I've read recently that some inverters have a killswitch that can be turned on at any moment. Oh, and if that's not that bad, anyone who installed your Solis inverter HAS access to your inverter, because you need a "installer" account to configure the device, allowing remote access to your small power plant.