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 By the time you’ve got a statistically useful failure rate for a specific model, that model has been superseded twice, and the factory has moved to a different cell technology.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.Â
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