When a solar company goes under: which of your warranties survive

A warranty is a promise from a specific company. If that company stops trading, the promise usually stops with it. The good news is that a solar system carries several warranties held by several different companies, so one insolvency rarely takes all of them. Work out which company promised what, and you will know exactly what you still have.

Start by listing the promises, not the parts

Most homeowners think of the system as one purchase. Warranties do not work that way.

Two different failures, two different outcomes. An installer closing is the common one, and it costs you the workmanship cover only. A manufacturer closing is rarer and hits harder, because the product warranty on that specific piece of hardware is the thing that goes.

The worst case is a company that was both. If the business that sold and installed your system also made the panels, then one insolvency takes the workmanship warranty and the panel warranty together, and there is no third party still standing behind the hardware.

What this site will and will not tell you

People usually land here after news about one particular brand. SunPower is the name that brings most of that traffic.

We are not going to tell you what SunPower's warranty says, how long it ran, or what the current status of any proceeding is. SunPower is not in this catalogue. Every warranty fact on this site comes from a manufacturer document that somebody read, with the date they read it printed next to the claim. We have not done that work for SunPower, so we are not going to write numbers we cannot stand behind. Insolvency situations also change, and a page written in September stating the position as fact is worse than useless by December.

What we can do is show you the shape of the problem, and show you what an intact manufacturer warranty looks like by comparison.

What an intact manufacturer warranty looks like

Here are brands in the catalogue where the manufacturer still exists and the terms have been read against the published document.

Notice what these have in common. Each one has a document, a company to serve it on, and conditions you can check today. That is the thing that disappears in an insolvency, and it is why the answer to "is my warranty still good" is really "is there still a company on the other end of it".

Working out where you stand

Do this in order.

1. Identify every manufacturer on the job. Panels, inverter or microinverters, battery, and the mounting system. That is four different companies on a typical install, and they are named on your contract, your design drawing and the labels on the hardware itself.

2. Check which of them are still trading. A quick search of the company name plus your country will usually settle it. Be careful with brand names that have been sold on. A brand can continue under new ownership while the entity that issued your warranty does not, and those are not the same thing.

3. Read what the surviving makers actually require. This is where people lose claims they were entitled to. A term that depended on registration, on a delivery note, or on a unit staying online can already be broken. The deadline calculator will tell you whether the brands on your roof have a clock or a condition.

4. Assemble the file for whatever is still claimable. Serial numbers, install date, proof of purchase, and evidence of the fault. The claim checklist lists what each brand asks for.

If the manufacturer of a specific part is gone

You are not necessarily out of options, but you are out of that manufacturer's warranty.

Things worth checking, in roughly this order:

• The rest of the system. One dead manufacturer does not touch the other three. An inverter maker going under leaves your panel warranties intact.
• Your consumer law rights. These are rights against the supplier of the goods, not a warranty from the manufacturer, so they do not vanish with the maker. Whether they help in your case depends on where you live, who sold you the system, and how long ago. Your national or state consumer protection body will talk to you about the specifics for free. That conversation is worth having before you accept a no.
• Any separate warranty product you were sold. Some systems are sold with a third-party warranty plan from an insurer or a scheme. That is a different contract, backed by a different company, and it may still be live. Look for it in your paperwork rather than assuming you were not sold one.
• The installer, if they are still trading. Their workmanship warranty does not cover a faulty panel, but a good installer with a dead supplier is still your best route to a sensible replacement.

The part that costs money

Even where the manufacturer warranty is intact, you are usually paying for labour.

The maker ships the replacement part. Somebody still has to diagnose the fault, get on the roof, swap the unit and commission it. If your workmanship warranty is gone, that bill is yours. Most brands in this catalogue pay nothing toward it. REC carries 240 months of labour cover on the Alpha Pure-R line, which is the outlier. Enphase pays a stated rate per visit in the United States. Everyone else expects you to fund the truck.

It is still far cheaper than replacing hardware outright, but budget for a service call rather than for nothing.

Do this while everything still works

Almost every bad outcome in this area traces to missing paperwork rather than to a missing company.

Find your contract, your invoice, your install date and the serial number of every major part. Photograph the labels. Save it all somewhere that is not an email account you might lose. Then check, once, whether any brand on your roof has a live condition attached to its term.

You cannot stop a manufacturer failing. You can make absolutely sure that the ones still standing have no excuse to refuse you.