What are the Types of Manufacturer Warranties?

Product Warranties. Performance warranties. Labor and installation support warranties. There’s a lot to compare when evaluating solar components for your projects. 

When home or business owners choose to invest in a solar energy system, the warranties provided by the manufacturers are often crucial considerations from their perspective as well. Solar product warranties protect your customers’ investments by ensuring the components function as intended and meet performance expectations over an extended period. 

Let’s tune into this quick clip from the Customer Contracts & Agreements course from David Dunlap, VP of Product Strategy at BayWa r.e., as he explains the different types of warranties you’ll come across when selling solar systems. 

Broadly speaking, the warranties will typically provide for the product, the original manufacturing  specification, right? Was the product made properly without defects and will it work? You know, you turn it on, it works, right? You connect it, it works. That’s the main thing. 

Depending on the product, depending on what the manufacturer is attempting to do with the product or the full warranty support, it might include more than just the product. It might include performance –  and that’s in the module space. We’ll get into that here in a second, but there’s usually two different numbers when we talk about the modules. There’s a product warranty and then a performance warranty.

With inverters and batteries, typically it’s essentially just only a product one, but the performance side of it is sort of rolled in.

And what we see commonly around batteries is it’s got a 10-year or an 8-year, or a 12-year warranty, but then it’s also based on a number of cycles – charge and discharge cycles. And so understanding what the intention was for how often this battery is going to be utilized, that’s actually more relevant than the number of years. 

If you think about the automobile industry, a lot of warranties are based on the miles you’ve driven, right? The harder you are on your vehicle, the less life it may have. If you garage it and you don’t drive, it stands to reason that things maybe are going to last a little longer. So that’s kind of typically the breakdown.

The third category that can sometimes work its way into solar warranties is labor/installation support. And that again, I think is the push towards from the manufacturer standpoint, we want our high quality product installed by high quality professionals who are following our trainings and guidelines so that we can have the best user experience. 

If they’re willing to invest in installer reimbursement for failures of their product, that’s a commitment to the industry, commitment to their partners to say, “yeah, we maybe didn’t get it right, but you shouldn’t have to pay out of pocket to make that replacement. So we’ll cover a truck roll, for example, to go out and swap out the inverter. Right. We’ll give you the new inverter as well, but we’re also going to pay you a flat rate, right?” $350 or something like that to cover the cost of the technician to go out to the site and swap out the product.  

So those are really the three categories.

Want to dig deeper into all the types of warranties that you’ll come across in solar installation? Enroll in the Customer Contracts & Agreements course to learn more!