In this article
Go and look at the place before you hand over twenty thousand dollars. Not because the website is lying, but because a warehouse, a support desk and an install team are three things a website cannot show you, and all three decide what year six of owning the system is like.
In short
- Ask to meet the aftercare team, not the salesperson. They are the people you will actually deal with.
- Look at the warehouse. Every extra handling point between the factory and your roof is a chance to void a warranty.
- Company size is routinely inflated. Walking in settles it in about a minute.
- If you cannot visit, look for real photographs of real staff rather than stock images. It is a low bar and plenty of companies fail it.
Meet the support team
A good salesperson is genuinely good at their job, which is the problem. They will make the decision feel comfortable and they may well get you to sign the same afternoon. None of that tells you anything about the person who will be on your roof, or the one answering the phone when the monitoring stops reporting in three years.
So ask to meet somebody else. Whoever handles support. What you are testing is whether the technical depth extends past the person selling, and you will know inside two questions.
Stock handling
Manufacturer warranties assume the product was handled properly all the way to your roof. Every extra transfer — importer to wholesaler to reseller to a subcontractor’s ute — is another opportunity for a panel to be dropped in a way nobody records, and microcracks do not show up until the output does, years later.
A company holding its own stock in its own warehouse has fewer of those points and knows where the product has been. If there is no warehouse to visit, that is worth asking about: not damning, but you want to know who is handling it.
Checking the business behind the quote
Bigger reads as safer, so the numbers get generous. Walking in resolves it faster than any amount of due diligence. Is there a team, or is there a desk. Is the place organised or is it chaos. Are the vans real.
Bigger is not automatically better either. What you want is a company large enough to still be trading when a warranty claim lands and small enough that somebody there knows your job. In this industry the failure mode is a business folding and reappearing under a new name, and the warranty going with it.
Aftercare arrangements
Most of the effort in this industry goes into selling. The questions arrive later: the app has stopped reporting, there is a code on the inverter, the bill did not fall as much as expected in the first quarter. That is ordinary and it needs somebody local to answer.
Ask directly what happens when the monitoring drops out, who fixes it, and whether it costs anything. Ask who raises a manufacturer warranty claim — you or them. The answers vary more than you would expect, and they are the difference between a system that keeps working and one you stop looking at.
Ours is PSW Life Support: a Perth team, remote diagnosis first, and we raise manufacturer claims rather than sending you to do it.
Checking an installer remotely
Plenty of people cannot, and a good remote assessment genuinely works — we quote thousands of jobs from photographs. What we ask is that you at least apply the same scepticism from a distance: real staff photos, a physical address you could visit, a support process someone will describe when asked, and a written quote that shows its working.
Our two are Bibra Lake in the south and Neerabup in the north, and both are ordinary working warehouses you are welcome to walk into. What to send if you would rather do it remotely is in the express quote guide.