Beware of cheap inverters!

Beware! When looking at setting up your own solar power It can be tempting to buy a cheap imported inverter, or a product containing one.  DON’T take the risk!

As part of our rigorous R&D and testing process, we have purchased a number of different inverter products, from cheap ones imported from the far east to expensive ones made in Europe. This enabled us to establish which ones would be fit / safe for use in our Ark product.  Only inverters which passed our extensive testing made the grade for consideration as components.

One of the inverters, sourced from Amazon, which did not pass our high quality threshold for inclusion in an early Ark design, was repurposed for light work, powering a TV as part of a test setup.  It had only been used occasionally, over the past 2 years, but we were clearly right to reject the design.  

At the weekend it went bang and ignited! - It had overheated, the fan inside had failed and the thermal protection, which should have shut it off, also malfunctioned.  

At Disconnected Energy, we approach our R&D with a healthy dose of paranoia. We test key components under challenging conditions for months or even years to ensure they can do what we need them to.  When it comes to protective systems, our approach is simple; you can never have too much redundancy! For critical systems monitoring, the Ark solar generator even has tertiary sensor backups in place to make sure it stays safe even under extreme conditions, for a very long time.

So whoever you buy your solar power or battery systems from, please invest in a quality inverter and preferably a system with multiple fail-safes like our Ark.