Sunteams Inverter - China - Beijing Kinglong New Energy Technology

Lately, a lot of cheap solar companies are using Sunteams inverters out of China.

It's an unheard of inverter brand which claims to have a maximum efficiency of 98%. So supposedly 1% more efficient than the Sunnyboys 5000TL made by SMA, the leading inverter brand in the world.

That's like saying a Hyundai was saver than a Mercedes.

The inverter is only allowed to be installed in Australia since mid June 2010.
But there are already reports in forums about problems with that unit.

5 August 2010:
A 10 kW system in Sydney, NSW performed very irregular. It has two identical arrays of 5 kW each and with two 5 kW Sunteams 5000 inverters.
One array is producing 30% less power during 2-3 hours in the day than the other one. There is no shade at all and it is an identical set up. 
Something seems wrong. But what can you expect from an inverter out of a $2 shop?

20 August 2010: The story ends as one of the sunteams inverters did not start up anymore - dead.
The link to that report (in German)



If you know more about these inverters, please leave a comment.
Cheers

Which inverter to chose?

the inverter is the heart of the system, it will define the output!!!

Watch out for cheap brands. Only rely on high quality (e.g made in Germany)

it should have at least a 95% efficiency.

Big differences are also the displays and the amount of data you can read out of them.


Make sure it has a nice LCD-Display, that shows you daily output, yearly output etc. Otherwise, you will not know, wheather the system performs as promissed.