Global leader in solar PV inverters, Chinese manufacturer Huawei is set to take the Australian market by storm with their 5kW inverter. While you may not recognise the name Huawei, these guys have been around for a long time, and are a leader in mobile technology and electronics around the world. They’ve also been making inverters for a long time, and they’re the biggest manufacturer of these products globally. This would lead us to believe that they know a thing or two about what it takes to make a good inverter.
We’ve seen this tidy little 10kg, 5kW product around at trade shows for some time, but now is the first time we’ve had them available in the Australian market. Here at MC Electrical, we’re going to thoroughly test and compare Huawei’s product against its biggest rival currently on the market: SolarEdge.
Now, in the video, Mark calls the Huawei inverter a possible game changer. This is for a couple of reasons. First of all, the inverter comes battery ready, meaning that, with the two inputs on the device, an LG battery can be plugged straight in and is ready to go. This plug and play solution is very simple and makes for an interesting proposition. The price of the Huawei product is comparable to that of non-battery ready devices like Fronius, and for that reason alone it’s a competitive offering.
Perhaps more importantly though is Huawei’s second impressive feature: The optimiser. These optimisers, as you’ll see in the video, can be plugged into every solar panel, and enable ‘optimisation’ of each panel individually. This means being able to read the output of every panel individually and optimise the performance of each panel selectively. Interestingly, if certain panels are being shaded by a tree or a chimney, the optimisers can be selectively deployed to where they’ll be most useful and avoided in areas where they won’t do as much good. Being able to plug these optimisers into individual panels gives the buyer the opportunity to save a little money by installing them on selected panels only.
Although we’re not putting 100% faith in these new, game-changing Chinese inverters just yet (you may remember the debacle we encountered with the GCL ‘game-changing’ batteries a few years ago, which turned out to be over-hyped and unreliable), we are hopeful. Huawei, being the biggest player in the global inverter market in terms of units shipped, are certainly no newcomers to technology and innovation. Their record speaks for itself in terms of both market share and profits.
Of course, we’ll be doing our due diligence and inspecting the results for ourselves. The new inverter will be installed here on our walls while we run comparisons with SolarEdge. Stay tuned for the results.
