SunAmp PV spares and maintenance issue

[TerryE]

I've just bought a replacement board at just under £90 inc VAT and delivery.  TBH, the SunAmp people have been very efficient in responding once I engaged with them.  There was a known issue with the 12A common track overloading, so later SunAmp PVs have an off-board bypass to mitigate this.  Mine being an early unit missed these updates.   The SA installation engineer has just said that he will include the bits and instructions with the replacement board, though I know what these will be.  I will need to retrofit this to my other unit as well.  I will post an update when I've done this just in case there are any other PV users so they can check their SunAmps.  So:

• ***** for SA support.
• **** for their continuous improvement.
• *** for their making me pay for the board.
• ** for after sales support and failure to notify customers when such a fix is needed.

But all-in-all I remain a happy customer.  

[jack]

13 minutes ago, TerryE said:

... known issue with the 12A common track overloading 

 

I agree, it's pretty poor that you're having to pay for rectification of an acknowledged problem. 

[Jeremy Harris]

The obvious question to ask is one of safety.  From your photos,  @TerryE , it would seem that there was a fire risk from this part overheating.  The following link is to a long list of domestic appliances recalled because of a fire risk: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/household-appliances-recalled-due-to-fire-risk

 

More recently, Whirlpool recalled 500,000 tumble dryers that posed a potential fire risk:  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/whirlpool-tumble-dryer-recall-hotpoint-indesit-fire-risk-a9015036.html

 

So why have Sunamp made a customer pay to replace a badly designed part that posed a potential fire risk? 

 

 

[TerryE]

This was partly a pragmatic decision on my part: by accepting that I needed to pay for the board, I also got a speedy and amicable response within days.  If I had dug my heals in and argued for free remediation, then this argument might have spun this out into weeks.  This was just not worth the hassle for £90.  I happen to be a pretty knowledgable customer, and so I have various remediation options.

 

What really concerns me more is the SunAmp relationship with their more typical customer base and their aftersales service.  With my BMW car, if there is a known risk then BMW write to me and inform me of a mandatory recall and fix such issues free of charge.  In this case it is impractical to recall commissioned SunAmp units, but at least they should consider their aftersales options.  Even if the commercial realities and contracted terms make it impractical for SunAmp to offer free remediation for such known issues with installed units, then at a minimum customers should be still advised of the issue and the fix options.   That's why I gave only two starts for after sales support.

 

This situation could be even worse: for example, we've just binned a £600 AEG microwave oven combi with about 18 month of use.  From the AEG user forums these failures are common with this model, and my reading of AEG's response seems to be consistent: if you haven't taken out extended warranty, then AEG will accept no liability or obligations after the standard 12 month warranty period has elapsed.

 

Yes SunAmp need to improve some processes, but overall I still give them the benefit of doubt because their product has compelling value for me.  I wouldn't recommend AEG products to anyone.

[SteamyTea]

4 hours ago, TerryE said:

if you haven't taken out extended warranty, then AEG will accept no liability or obligations after the standard 12 month warranty period has elapsed.

Isn't there an expectation of a reasonable life for products under EU law.

I had my washing machine price refunded from Tesco, eventhough it was outside the 12 months.  Was a bit of hassle to get sorted (they 'lost' the paperwork), but Tesco gave me 100 quid in vouchers to cover than.

[TerryE]

I am getting a bit too old to tilt at every windmill these days. Jan and I reckoned that the chances of us getting anything back were smaller than the hassle involved in attempting to.

[Onoff]

I'd have fought SunAmp over this. The SoGA says stuff should last a reasonable time, up to 6 years I believe.

[SteamyTea]

How long should a water cylinder last, mine managed 31 years. One of my neighbours has never changed his, so that is now 32 years old.

And these are basic E7 Cooper cylinders, nothing fancy, just a bucket with very soft water in then.

What are the chances a SA will last that long?

Mind you, I do loose 10p a day through heat loss. So £1130 heating up the house, whether I want it to it not.

[Jeremy Harris]

I think the issue here is one mentioned before.  Sunamp seem to have adopted a technology company approach to the product design and "testing" of these things, with early customers doing a fair bit of the development testing, and consequently finding some problems.  Nothing wrong with that as long as customers are made fully aware of this before they buy.  For example, when I bought our original Sunamp PV I did so fully understanding that it was a early production version, and may not be as reliable as the final version.  I had no problem with that at all.

 

Move forward three years to the release of the Sunamp UniQ and things had very much changed.  When I purchased the UniQ I thought I was buying a mature product, that had been tested and shown to be reliable and function as would be expected.  The reality was that what I bought turned out to be far from production-ready.  The case distorted badly, the supplied lid wouldn't fit properly and the control system didn't work properly.  Sunamp shipped a new design of lid quickly, which partially resolved some of the case-related issues.  They eventually got around to replacing the control box and sensors, which seems to have resolved the control issues we were having completely.  They also offered to replace the whole unit, to resolve the case bulging problem, but I declined, solely because of the work involved in swapping out a 150kg unit that's installed on the first floor.

 

I suspect that most domestic appliances go through a significantly longer and more rigorous testing stage than Sunamp products.  Some of this may just be experience - a company that's been manufacturing washing machines for years will have built up a significant knowledge base of likely failure modes for any new model design.  A new startup, with a brand new product, won't have that advantage.

[SteamyTea]

1 hour ago, JSHarris said:

A new startup, with a brand new product, won't have that advantage.

That is why they need to pay a third party to 'rapid age' the product.

Rapid aging does not have to be expensive, used to do it on my steam rooms. Shame that my old boss, who should have known better, decided to change materials without telling anyone, leading to multiple 'unexplained' failures.

It is why we have quality assurance paperwork, it is not to raise the quality, but rather to find out why quality has dropped.

They don't tellingly that in the books.

[TerryE]

This is a difficult one and I have some sympathy for the company.  We seem to expect to change our smart phones every few years; a PC maybe 3-4 years; 10 years for an ASHP perhaps; cars have a typical life of 10-15 years, though the average length of ownership is just over 4.  So what is the reasonable life expectancy for a piece of kit like a SunAmp?  My instinct is something like 10 years.  I'd certainly approach the design differently if it were my product, with a greater emphasis on as-installed maintainability.

 

The issue is that this unit is plumbed in to your DHW and at ~85kg per unit, these aren't trivial to lug around even it it is just to get access for maintenance.  Jeremy made the comment that his UniQ is under the eaves on the first floor.  My PVs are on the ground-floor but on a platform shelf over the rest of my UFH and DCW installation, and this means that I also need lifting equipment to drop one to floor level.  In retrospect I think that this was a bad design decision.  The best place for heavy bits of kit is on the floor at ground level.  This makes maintenance and swap-out so much easier.

 

Anyway my replacement board got delivered yesterday and I replaced it today.  It has the 240V "neutral" bypass fix as discussed.  This is a Rev 13 board whereas my current boards are both Rev 10, and there are both component and layout differences between the two boards.  They've also made some other changes such as to replace the L / PV-L / N / E input pluggable M/F terminal block pair with a single screwdown terminal block.  The PITA is that this block seems to use a screw-down blade attachment -- the sort typically used for bare cable and not ferruled multi-core. Certainly the female hole size was not big enough to take the ferrules that I already had on the cables (and these were the smallest that would take the full multi-core cable) so off came the ferrules again.

 

Still everything is working though looking at my thermometer logs from the DS18B20 next to the 240V phase trace, the board temperature here still peaked at 47.3°C -- better than the 50.2°C on my fixed old board, but still warmer than I would like.  And I still have the issue of what to do with my other PV with the rev 10 control board fitted.

 

 

Edited August 18, 2019 by TerryE

[Jeremy Harris]

@TerryE, my inclination would be to take a look at the board with a thermal camera as I suspect that the track temperature may well be a red herring, and the heat may be being conducted to the track from elsewhere.  It's hard to see how that track alone could cause the temperature increase, and I suspect it may be coming from something like the relay coil.  A thermal image would probably show whether this is the case.  If you've got an Android device that has a micro USB connector, then I could lend you my Seek Thermal camera.

[TerryE]

You are right in that the thermometer can is actually lying on top of the relays, so this might be relay heat.  I'll have to look out the data sheet for its contact closed power loss for the coil.    I'd love to have a play with a thermal camera, but I suspect that time is running out before we are off to Alonissos again.  In the meantime I have a good thermal sensor for this sort of temperature range on the end of a finger. 

[TerryE]

19 hours ago, JSHarris said:

I suspect it may be coming from something like the relay coil.

 

Yup both boards seem to peak at around 65°C after about 16 mins on (measured directly above the closed relay) and stay around this temperature whilst the relay is closed.  So yes, it is the power relay being closed (now that the damaged board has been swapped out).

 

Here is the data sheet for the Schrack (RZ03-1A4-D012) relays; it uses 0.4W when closed.  That's about 200W/m² over a package of that size if free-standing, but it is hard against another relay so the actual output is higher over the radiating surface.   It's not surprising that the relay gets up to gets up to 65°C.  Note that this is still within the specification of 85°C.

Edited August 19, 2019 by TerryE