Warranty coverage is one of our customer’s main concerns: What do I do if something goes wrong? SunPower is the only panel brand to put customers at ease. Back in 2017, SunPower announced its Complete Confidence Warranty, a coverage that shocked the solar market and is still today’s best 25-year solar warranty. Let’s take a look at why.
Product Warranty: 25 Years
Not all manufacturer’s warranty every component of their solar systems. In most cases, each piece of a conventional system is covered by different manufacturing warranties. A common example of warranty issues we hear about in the field is inverter failures. Let’s say one of your conventional string inverters fails. In order to replace / repair your inverter, you must find the manufacturer of your inverter, call them up, and see if it is still under warranty. In order for them to check, they will need the correct serial number (usually found where the inverter is located, sometimes on the roof!).
With a SunPower system, there is no hassle. All the components are designed and engineered to work together and backed by a single source – SunPower. Upon installation, your panels / microinverters are all registered for warranty by your dealer (SAVKAT).
Repair Coverage: 25 Years
Depending on the solar company you choose, there may be service costs associated with the purchase of your system. To continue our inverter example, shipping or labor of a replacement inverter may not be covered by the warranty. This is not the case with a SunPower system: SunPower is the only company to cover all costs associated with repairs. SunPower covers the entire system for 25 years. With SAVKAT as your installing dealer, we will oversee handling all of your maintenance and repair needs through SunPower.
Power Guarantee: 25 Years
While doing your warranty research, make sure you not only ask about product warranties but also power warranties. What is a power warranty? SunPower not only covers the equipment under warranty but also the amount of power your system will generate. What?! Loss of energy production is natural in the solar panel world. However, SunPower will guarantee the amount of power production promised and modeled for your system for 25 years.
How can they promise so much production? SunPower, in a partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, developed a way to calculate solar panel degradation. This method was used to calculate the degradation of 264 SunPower solar systems installed worldwide over an eight-year period of time. The results showed that SunPower panels degraded less than 0.25 percent per year. The annual degradation rate of conventional solar panels is twice this number.
Extensive Environmental Testing and Coverage
You may think that there are some restrictions to the SunPower Complete Confidence Warranty because it sounds so complete, right? Too good to be true for people that live in difficult weather conditions? Nope! SunPower’s warranty covers all their systems, even in the harshest environments. Each system and panel undergoes testing to varying degrees of rain, hail, sleet, snow loads, salt spray, and more (read more from our blog on natural disasters here). SunPower has used these tests to rate their panels and give confidence to consumers that they stand behind every system, regardless of the natural elements it may meet.
All components of SunPower systems are designed and manufactured in-house by SunPower. If there is an issue, the homeowner has just one company to call and one warranty to deal with. SunPower is proud to offer Cradle-to-Cradle protection for your system, which means that they take care of you from the beginning to end of your system’s 25-year useful life.
