Which solar brands pay for labour, and which leave you the truck roll

Most residential solar brands pay nothing toward labour. In the United States, Enphase reimburses $200 per truck roll plus $25 per replaced microinverter. REC's Alpha Pure-R line carries 240 months of labour cover. Fronius Primo GEN24 Plus, GoodWe ET Series and Sungrow SH RT each carry 12 months. Every other line in the catalogue carries none.

The number that matters is not the headline term

A twenty five year panel warranty and a ten year inverter warranty are parts numbers. They say the manufacturer will replace the failed item. They say nothing about who gets it off the roof.

That gap is the single biggest cost in warranty work for an installer, and it is almost never on the sales sheet. A brand can advertise a term that reads longer than a mortgage and still leave every visit after year one entirely on you.

So when you are comparing brands, read two columns, not one. Parts months and labour months. They are different products.

The labour position, line by line

This is what our warranty catalogue holds, each entry taken from the manufacturer's own published document with the date it was read.

Twenty lines. Four with labour months on them, one with a dollar figure, fifteen with nothing. That is the shape of the market, and it does not change much whichever brands you carry.

Enphase is the one that pays cash

Enphase is the only brand in the catalogue that expresses labour cover as money rather than months, which makes it the only one you can hold directly against your own costs.

In the United States, Enphase reimburses $200 per truck roll plus $25 per replaced microinverter. On top of that there is a paid Labor Protection Program, which extends labour cover to five or ten years from activation.

Two things follow.

First, on a job where several microinverters fail at once, the per-unit payment starts to matter. One visit that replaces six units is $200 plus $150, not $200. On a single-unit callout it is $225 and the visit cost is what it is.

Second, a truck roll costs more than $200 in most businesses, so the reimbursement offsets the visit rather than covering it. That is still far better than the fifteen lines above that pay nothing, and it is why the comparison is worth doing properly rather than assuming. Work out your own figure with the truck roll calculator, then read the Labor Protection Program breakdown with that number in hand.

One caution on the IQ8 term itself. Enphase applies the 25 year microinverter term from activation in Enlighten, not from installation. If the system was never activated, the term you are counting on is not the term you have. That is a condition, and it is checkable in a minute at handover.

REC is the outlier nobody talks about

The Alpha Pure-R line carries 240 months of labour cover, which is twenty years, and it is the longest labour term in the catalogue by a wide margin.

There is a catch, and it is a condition rather than a deadline. REC's ProTrust cover, the one on the sales brochure, exists only if an REC Certified Solar Professional installed the system and registered the installation in ProPortal or the SunSnap app. No deadline is published for that registration. The standard product warranty needs nothing at all.

So the twenty years of labour is real and it is contingent. If nobody registered the install, the system falls back to the standard product warranty and the labour cover you were selling on is not there. Since there is no published deadline, it is easy to defer forever, which is exactly how it gets lost. Register at commissioning while the details are in hand. The REC registration page has the fields.

The twelve month lines are a year, not a decade

Fronius Primo GEN24 Plus, GoodWe ET Series and Sungrow SH RT each carry 12 months of labour alongside 120 months of parts.

Read that as it is. For year one, a failure is a phone call and a visit that the manufacturer contributes to. From year two through year ten, the manufacturer sends the box and you send the truck, at your own cost.

That is not a criticism of those brands. Twelve months is twelve months more than most of the catalogue offers. It just means your service pricing for those units needs to reflect what happens in year four, not what happens in month three.

There is also a condition sitting underneath two of them. GoodWe's ten year parts term holds only while the inverter is connected to the SEMS portal with generation data uploading, and where a Lynx battery is fitted, only while both serials are registered. Miss either and the term is five years, with no notification. Fronius's free ten year Warranty Plus requires registration in Solar.web within 30 months of delivery ex works, and registering also moves the start of cover from delivery to commissioning. Sungrow, by contrast, requires nothing: the ten year term runs from the installation date whether anyone registers or not.

What to do with this

Price service by brand. A shop that charges the same warranty callout rate across every brand it fits is cross-subsidising the brands that pay nothing with the ones that pay something. Your rate card can reflect the table above.

Put labour in the buying decision. When two inverters are within a few dollars at the distributor, twelve months of labour cover against none is a real difference in your service cost over ten years. So is a conditional term against an unconditional one. Compare them side by side on the inverter warranty page.

Protect the cover you were sold on. REC's twenty years of labour, Fronius's free ten years, GoodWe's ten instead of five, Enphase's 25 year term from activation: each of those depends on something being done or confirmed at commissioning. None of them tell you when it lapses. Use the deadline calculator to see what applies to a given install date, and keep the confirmation with the job rather than in an inbox.

Log what each claim actually costs. Reimbursement is only half the picture. The other half is what the visit cost you, and that is a number you have to keep yourself. Claim Timer holds the record for each piece of equipment and builds the claim pack when a part fails, but it does not file with the manufacturer for you, and cost reporting across a quarter is not built yet.

Check anything you are relying on against the brand's current document. Terms change, distributor deals differ, and the catalogue entries above carry the date each one was read for that reason.