Llaves
New Member
("Eat your own dog food" is an expression meaning for a company and/or it's employees to use their own products).
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like nobody at Sol-Ark, at least in a decision-making position, has direct experience with living with an off-grid system. I've had my 12K for about 6 months now and have missed some features that were present in my Outback system 15 years ago. The most notable is that the 12K does not generate any sort of alarm, fault, or warning if there is a gen-start failure. When I brought this up with tech support the response was along the lines of, "yeah, there's no warning". I submitted a feature request, which I would have thought would get a "oh god, how did we miss this" sort of response, but instead got a generic "thanks for your input". In a similar vein, with the Outback system I could start a generator charge cycle, put it in auto-mode, and the generator would shut down when the batteries reached the programmed SOC. The 12K does not have this feature. If you start the generator with Gen Force, it stays on until you turn it off. There's no way to set it to turn off once it reaches the programmed SOC for a normal generator cycle. (Or so I've been told by tech support.)
So, is it just me, or have other off-grid owners found Sol-Ark to be a bit clueless about life in an off-grid world? Seems like they need a user advisory panel to help them prioritize feature requests.
BTW - I want to be clear this is not a generalized complaint about their tech support staff. For the most part they are knowledgeable and timely in responding to questions. The problem exists at a higher level of the company in my view.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like nobody at Sol-Ark, at least in a decision-making position, has direct experience with living with an off-grid system. I've had my 12K for about 6 months now and have missed some features that were present in my Outback system 15 years ago. The most notable is that the 12K does not generate any sort of alarm, fault, or warning if there is a gen-start failure. When I brought this up with tech support the response was along the lines of, "yeah, there's no warning". I submitted a feature request, which I would have thought would get a "oh god, how did we miss this" sort of response, but instead got a generic "thanks for your input". In a similar vein, with the Outback system I could start a generator charge cycle, put it in auto-mode, and the generator would shut down when the batteries reached the programmed SOC. The 12K does not have this feature. If you start the generator with Gen Force, it stays on until you turn it off. There's no way to set it to turn off once it reaches the programmed SOC for a normal generator cycle. (Or so I've been told by tech support.)
So, is it just me, or have other off-grid owners found Sol-Ark to be a bit clueless about life in an off-grid world? Seems like they need a user advisory panel to help them prioritize feature requests.
BTW - I want to be clear this is not a generalized complaint about their tech support staff. For the most part they are knowledgeable and timely in responding to questions. The problem exists at a higher level of the company in my view.