Many in the UK
trade will not touch them, myself included
Mr Sterling Jr is at least less angry and rude than his father but the staff I have dealt with have often had a poor understanding of product and concepts and the some of the kit has been terrible.
My experience with them on the AMPS
batteries was terrible - my customer bought a dozen of them at great cost and they told him to connect to their
Inverter charger that had no
lithium setting or ability to program. The AMPS batteries in 2020 were simply
cheap chinese with a Sterling sticker on and had a poor BMS and not great cells either - the exact same battery could be had then for 1/3 the
price without the pretty AMPS sticker. I am not sure but I think they have changed supplier now but kept the name.
I spent an hour talking with them about these and explained how the charger they recommended would damage the batteries over time by leaving them on float charge at 14.4v as is LA. They literally had no idea what I was talking about because they had no idea about LiFePo chemistry and only knew they had to see something to make
money and keep up with others
I explained carefully the issue and what really killed their credibility was the reply from the
head of technical that they had a 5 year warranty and if after 5 years these batteries had
lost a "normal amount " of capacity like 10-15% they would not replace them but if they had a sudden drop of say 40 or 50% capacity they would. Completely misunderstanding everything I had said.. To clarify for those that don't do this all the time, good LifePo should last 15 years or more - some have
lost 0% of capacity after 15 years - my own tests lost 0.7% over 5 years of heavy use (cooking etc) and for anyone to think a 15% loss of capacity over 5 years is normal shows poor understanding and lack of care about doing things right and more interest in sell more over priced crap in 5 years.
Many of their products have issues, their instructions and even the design of the interfaces are terrible and many many people will tell you that they have been called idiots, sworn at and generally dismissed by Mr Sterling when calling for support .
I am glad the OP had a positive experience but after many years in the
trade and dealing with them and trying to sort out issues with their products I will need to hear a lot more positives to convince me to even try their stuff again. I hate to denigrate a UK company, being
English, but everything Sterling do can be had better and cheaper elsewhere from Victron, Renogy, Alfatronix etc .. except the A2B charger which seems unique to Sterling and is a simple and mostly reliable solution but becoming redundant these days.