Every year we publish the Installer’s Choice Awards, and every year the same two objections turn up in the comments within about four milliseconds.
Objection #1: Where Are The Super-Cheap Brands?
Commenter Paul claims that SolarQuotes installers are no better than used-car salesmen who just want to sell something with a far higher installer margin.
My answer to Paul comes from a grumpy ex-trader who has never installed a solar panel in his life: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and his classic book, Skin in the Game:
“If you give an opinion, and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences. In case you are giving economic views: Don’t tell me what you ‘think,’ just tell me what’s in your portfolio.”
Which is, essentially, the question we ask installers: what they’d put on their own house, with their own money, for a system they’ll live with for years. And yes – they almost certainly sell and recommend that same brand. They’d be hypocrites not to.
The fact that very few good installers won’t put the cheap stuff on their own homes is not a conspiracy against the budget brands, it’s a signal worth noticing.
Some commenters weren’t happy that the cheapest brands didn’t do well in the Installer’s Choice Award for best battery.
Objection #2: The SolarQuotes Awards Are Populist Bullshit
Matthew puts it bluntly: a popularity vote like the SQ awards is about as useful as the US voting system, and ranking on real performance and reliability data would be far better.
I’d love to publish reliability rankings based on hard-failure data.
There’s the obvious problem: nobody will share it. Apart from SunPower.
But the bigger problem is that reliability data is, by definition, retrospective. To know how a panel performs after five years in the field, you need five years and a field. By the time you’ve got a statistically useful failure rate for a specific model, that model has been superseded twice, and the factory has moved to a different cell technology.
And nobody wants to buy it. Ask a homeowner whether they’d like the 2021 model with five years of proven field data or this year’s release, and watch what happens.
Field data can tell you whether a brand, over time, tends to make gear that lasts and to honour warranties when it doesn’t. Macro brand-level reliability. But a good installer who has been fitting that brand for eight years, in your climate, on your kind of roof, and dealing with that brand’s warranty department when things go wrong, can give you that same macro signal for free.
SunPower solar panels – a rare example of a company that shares hard-failure data – installed by Goulburn Solar.
What The Installer’s Choice Awards Are
The awards tell you what people with commercial exposure to the answer would choose for themselves. As Scott, in the panel comments, eloquently puts it:
“Can we not just use Occam’s razor here and think that installers are voting for a product they’ve found to be good without second-guessing weird motives?”
They’re one input.
If you want more inputs, we also rank hardware based on customer feedback and list brands we are happy to recommend.
All three signals are imperfect, but if they’re all pointing in the same direction for a specific brand, I’d say that’s a good sign.
Read up on the winners of the Installer’s Choice Awards revealed so far:
Phase Shift is a weekly opinion column by SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock. Subscribe to SolarQuotes’ free newsletter to get it emailed to your inbox each week along with our other home electrification coverage.
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We had a local installer (not one of yours as far as I know ) and a relative by marriage,install a Sigenergy system around 18 months ago.
He had a Tesla himself as an early adopter,and had tried several other brands as well.
This was certainly not the cheapest option but he was able to show us, that you get what you pay for.
It had also been installed correctly, but the recalled bit was still replaced once stock became available.
Nice to see Sig take top spot
The problem with the Taleb quote is that he wants to see what people actually do, not what they say they would do. What brands have they acrually bought themselves, not what they say they would do? And assuming they have not getting a special deal. A salesman who tells you the oroduct is so good they would buy it themselves? Mr Taleb would not be impressed!
Hi Finn and Anthony,
I’d love to see this collection rounded out with “which installers would the installers use to install their gear”
After getting 6 quotes from SQ and Solar choice we went back to our original installer for a battery.
The excuses from the SQ rated installers were many and multiple – we had to AC couple and not DC couple, install had to occur on western side near the existing inverter and meter box, we won’t touch your panels as it will void your warranty, don’t need backup as Adelaide never gets blackouts – how I laughed and laughed!
I can understand the reference to used car 🚙 sales reps.
To answer the question – we went with a cheap battery as I couldn’t fathom spending $20k on Sigenergy, Tesla in a 3P house or Sun Grow with this appalling and unprofessional behaviour from CEC approved installers.
Cheers.
We commentators are the most opinionated or concerned, not necessarily the most qualified or representative SQ readers. Patterns seem to emerge though, reading thousands of comments:
“Shoulders” tell us what the world “should” do: cut daily charge / ToU / demand tariff, etc. Self interest is usually detectable.
Socialists who propose a tax on this or that, to suit their preference or benefit.
The seriously annoyed who want to go off-grid, to stick it to the DNSPs who charge too much. That that’d cost more only amplifies the annoyance, often.
The distrustful, suspicious of others’ motives. Does the vulnerability of deep ignorance on this techy stuff feed that? Own due diligence – quizzing friends, neighbours, workmates, Whirlpool discussion groups, builds anecdotal confidence, a working baseline for comparison. And learn enough to understand your own needs, current and future. It’s a fair bit of work, but worth the effort. Demand capability demonstration, e.g. blackout islanding.
Installers might be good judges of the features of a product that help make a good installation but they are not in a position to judge performance and reliability. Both need time.
Installers, like other middlemen, are also influenced by profit margins and how quickly they can finish the job.
A survey of solar owners could be a more reliable source of information about “best” inverter, panel and battery. Question such as installed size, panel orientation, time of exposure, age, warranty claims, distributor accessibility, electricity output at different times of the day and in different atmospheric conditions, battery cycle amounts, actual discharge rates, storage loss with time…could be collated over time to give a more objective look at “best”.
Asking installers to judge something that they don’t see in operation over time is as reliable as asking an appliance salesman for a fridge recommendation.
“Installers, like other middlemen, are also influenced by profit margins and how quickly they can finish the job.”
And not forgetting the (alleged) all-expenses-paid junket trips to China in the guise of ‘factory tours’. Or the special discounts and freebies on hardware the installers get for meeting turnover targets.
From the other perspective, using system owners’ opinions is fraught with inaccuracies, too. Most solar/battery owners have only ever had one system installed. They may like or hate it, but how do they rationally compare brands and installers beyond the quoting stage?
A full solar/battery install could well be Average Joe and Josephine’s third biggest expenditure in their life! There has to be a better way.
This particular humble solar owner is happy to take up your ‘survey offer’.
I have 3 solar systems on my roof – a 1kW system of Conergy panels and SMA inverter, installed March 2008; a 2.22kW system of Trina panels and Aero Sharp inverter, installed October 2010; a 1.56kW system of QCells panels with enphase microinverters; a Sigenstor 32kWh ( 4 x Batt 8.0 ) battery installed December 2025.
I can report that I am 100% happy with my home made energy, plus storage journey. Everything has worked as intended and the only piece of equipment that has needed to be replaced was the Aero Sharp inverter, that in November 2025 began to fail and was replaced – after 15 years faithful service – with a Sungrow inverter.
It is a 5 Stars ( out of 5 Stars ) rating by this particular humble solar judge.
Oops, I forgot to include that the QCells panels and Enphase microinverters were installed in October 2016.
System owners would be the last persons who would know how good a system they got in comparison to other brands, they installed only one brand, they use only one brand. Assuming it hasn’t died – they have no idea if it is performing any better or worse than any other brand would have performed on their particular roof.
To Andrew and Clive. You are right about user’s opinions being unreliable. Data collection for a credible study doesn’t rely on anyone’s opinions but on objective data.
And when the data is combined all brands can be compared.
You don’t ask owners what they think you ask them for data – so different systems can be compared. Brand of panels, number of panels age of panels, output at 09:00, output at 22:00, output at 16:00 on specific dates would all be a good starting point if you’re looking to compare panels. No opinion involved here.
An objective credible scientific survey would be far more useful than the survey of installers on SQ which, when you read the responses of installers in most cases, don’t have anything but stars and no comments. And are fraught with the shortcomings highlighted in my original post
I think you’ve got your lines crossed about how a proper survey works
Re: Objection 1.
When it comes to batteries SQ don’t provide a graph showing entry level to top end brands like they do solar panels so it’s a little harder to say what’s ‘super-cheap’ (and nasty) but aren’t Sig, Sungrow, and basically any CCP brand on the cheaper end of the scale? Fronius, iStore, and Tesla appear to somewhat more, possibly a lot more if you need a specific Fronius hybrid-inverter, but their data doesn’t go back to Beijing, or does it? The SQ in depth analysis link for iStore off the battery page goes to Huawai, infamous for bans in multiple countries due to its alleged links to the CCP, MSS, PLA etc.
The Taleb quote is asking what have you done, whereas SQ’s question is what would you do, hypothetically, if you were to install something. They seem to be opposites.
Re: Objection 2
By the time model data become available the model is no longer current. Isn’t this basically the same as cars? Trusted brands v nasty newcomers. And yet …
Great response!
Look at where Kia are today vs their entry into the Australian market all those years ago and my favourite slogan of all time –
“Buy Volvos. They’re boxy, but they’re good“
John,
Apart from a few batteries made by Tesla, the preponderance of global lithium battery supply *all* comes from the world’s battery technology leader – China. One manufacturer there, CATL, produces about 40% of world supply.
My 46 kWh of LFP batteries are made by EVE, which sidesteps CATL’s storage market dominance by focussing on BEVs. So, yes, my home batteries are EV grade, well able to take higher (dis)charge rates. (I believe my MG4 has the same prismatic cells.)
Vendors of consumer boxes can change battery content at will. Buy e.g. a Fronius solar inverter, and Selectronic or Victron battery inverter, plus a stack of 5.1 kWh boxed batteries (or a 34 kWh box, if preferred), and you can choose the brand of LFP cells it contains. Each cell is QR coded, for on-line database lookup to confirm DOM & test capacity – per cell!
My daily solar data goes back to Holland, where all the nifty graphs are generated for me. If I open access, China can have it too.
I sincerely regret not using your heading for objection #2 in my original post. It is much more succinct. I considered using bizzare in there somewhere, something like ” bizzare to have a brand not on SQs recommended list win” might have worked.
I agree with the title, in that I am putting more trust into an article if there is a history of honest reporting and the affiliations are clear. That give me at least the illusion that I can use this information.
As far as the reliability of an installed systems goes, that depends on a robust installation and components that are reliable in the first place. Add to that the pre-install advice and post install service if something goes wrong.
As with many things the cheapest offer is not likely to deliver all of this and the most expensive is not going to fit the budget. So most of us we end up the in the middle somewhere.
And that is where we need as much good information as possible to make an informed decision. It’s not going to be perfect, but good enough is almost always good enough.
I used to work for a company that did industry awards, it was funny that the winners were always at the front expensive tables…. make of that what you will.
With these awards its a feedback loop if we assume halons razor is at play. SolarQuotes doesn’t have installers that will pay the SolarQuotes fees/commission and compete for the volume with brands like FoxESS etc. Because of that, they don’t get the votes and the awards then don’t reflect the actual domestic BESS market.
Ask any grass roots installer, they will tell you that they don’t have far less troubles and warranty issues with FoxESS compared with SigEnergy.
Never once has SolarQuotes lead with “this is good for the consumer, even if it makes us less money”
“Never once” is a big call! If that was really true we simply wouldn’t exist – there would be no reason to use our website.
We put consumer interests ahead of making money every day – we are constantly rejecting installer applications to join our network because they didn’t meet our vetting standards. Then there’s the financial backing we give to consumers via our Good Installer Guarantee.
You mention Sigenergy – we were the outlet that revealed their overheating issue, despite being a premium brand that is popular among our own installers. We’ve reported similarly on Fox ESS’s issues and will keep putting consumer interests first, no matter the cost.