Quote:
Originally Posted by Vasco
I don't know about reliability but Zantrax's service was great recently.
Got to the boat in January after a six month lay-up. The less than 1 year old Zantrax inverter/charger (2000) was shot. Zantrax sent out a newer model as the old one was no longer in production. They sent it out before receiving the old one. It might have been because they were dealing with a boatyard and not an individual customer but I got the new one pretty quick. Apparently some circuit boards had fallen apart while the boat was sitting. Very strange as these things usually crap out when in use.
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Ekh, good service is a great thing, but it's still no substitute for gear which is fundamentally reliable!! Why can't they make
equipment like this which at least survives the warranty period??!!
Anyway, that's much better service than I got from Victron. It took them more than a month to replace the bad circuit board. In my case that was not a big problem because my boat was
on the hard anyway (and I bought another
charger to maintain my
batteries, which I now understand I must keep as a backup).
The warranty service was not at all the main thing -- the cost would have only been 90 euros or something if my unit had not been in warranty. All that is nothing compared to the immense hassle of removing and reinstalling the unit.
Other defective Victron gear I have includes the expensive isolation transformer, which was defective out of the box, with oversensitive breakers which eventually died altogether. Victron issued a service bulletin suggested to remove and bypass the breakers. I did not send the unit in for warranty service because the hassle of removing it and hassle and cost of
shipping it would have been much more burdensome than just repairing the unit myself in situ. I haven't gotten around to it because I no longer keep my boat in a marina, so rarely on
shore power now, never long enough to create a big risk of stray
current corrosion. Anyway, after installing the isolation transformer, there was zero improvement in my anode
consumption -- I was just in a hot marina, as it turned out. On my
mooring, anodes last longer.