02/16/2014
Anonymous
PA
Sales staff is very knowledgeable and worked with us to get through the contract process somewhat painlessly. Installation had some problems, but Astrum was able to complete the ground installation with trenching by the contracted deadline. The panels have replaced around 75% of my electric bill and in general are generating more electricity than expected. The problems I am having are related to an Enphase inverter failure rate of 1 inverter going bad every 3 months (5 total since installation). Although Astrum is not responsible for the hardware failures, they are contractually responsible for warranty support. The latest inverter failure occurred almost 1 month ago and the only communication with Astrum has been initiated by me. On average (if you continue to call the support line), it takes about 4-6 weeks to get a tech onsite to perform the warranty replacement.<br /><br />Also, be careful with the Enphase monitoring site. Right now, I have one panel that has not produced any electricity in almost 1 month and the public facing web site shows everything is operating normal. You have to take the extra effort to log onto the Enphase site to see a panel is not producing. I highly recommend configuring the alerts under Settings/Notification Preferences to “Immediate email for medium and greater impact eventsâ€, or the next option down in the list.<br /><br />Bottom line is don't trust the Enphase public web site to tell you something is wrong with your system and do NOT wait on Astrum to contact you about problems with your system. Aside from all of this, I probably would still recommend Astrum Solar as a good solar provider.
Reviewer reply
07/28/2015
Changing names has not improved customer service. I am on the verge of filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. I now have 3 inverters that are completely dead and 2 more that are intermittent, which will bring my total of replaced inverters to 25 in 2 years 9 months. Considering it takes Astrum/Direct Energy over 4 weeks to replace failed inverters, I have no idea what my system would produce during any given month. By the way, Astrum/Direct Energy has not sent a single outage check because they low balled my production estimate by approximately 2 mega watts per year. So don't expect any warranty checks from inverter outages. At this point, I would not recommend this installer based solely on their lack of customer support and questionable business practices associated with their warranty.
Direct Energy Solar (formerly Astrum) reply
07/30/2015
Please accept our sincerest apology for inconvenience. I’ve reached out to our Customer Relations Team and they informed me that they’ve been in contact with you about this matter. To follow-up, our team has confirmed that we will have a surveyor available tomorrow to re-survey your system and calculate a correct site quality for you. Once we have that data, we will be able to recalculate your production guarantee and request any compensation you are owed throughout the lifetime of your system. <br /><br />Additionally, we should be receiving replacements for the last inverters you reported issues with by Wednesday of next week. We will try to schedule an <br />appointment for these replacements by the end of next week, but more likely we will complete these repairs for you during the week of August 10th.<br /><br />If the survey appointment for tomorrow will be an inconvenience, please reach out to us at 410-443-5751 as soon as possible to reschedule. Otherwise, we look forward to finding some resolution to the issues you've been experiencing and I want to thank you for your continued patience while we get your system back up to 100%. <br />