Is this forum the proper way to get product support? From what I see on the Victron website, there are only two options. I can either get in touch with the dealer or use this forum. So is there not a product support email or contact form where I can get in touch with Victron staff?
Hi @BjornM,
The situation is explained a little in the community guidelines:
The Victron support model is that the dealers are responsible for learning the products and supporting their customers.
Victron will support the dealers to learn the products. We provide a news service via Victron Professional that sends emails out about important firmware updates, end users can subscribe to this if they want, but it is intended for our dealer network.
You only have to teach a dealer once, and then they can help many end customers.
Victron also has regular training sessions on our products for dealers.
Victron will support our equipment (hardware warranty, firmware, software, VRM) AND our distributor network. Then the design, selection, installation, integration, implementation, commissioning, customer documentation, ongoing support and service provided to end users and installers are all to be provided by the distributors.
On our support page - Need support? - Victron Energy
There is an additional link that ‘formalises’ a support request from a customer to a dealer. It is still between the dealer and the customer, but it also notifies Victron that there is an issue, and gives you an opportunity to tell Victron at the end how that experience went (e.g. positively or negatively).
Victron distributors and dealers are the recommended people to talk to FIRST about Victron products. Talking to a dealer about your power requirements, budget, after sales support expectations, system design, allows both you and them to make sure that you’re getting the right parts, and have reasonable expectations of performance.
There are 1000’s of Victron dealers and distributors around the world, each with their own experience and specialities. We hope that a suitably qualified one is local to you, but it might involve some time sending out emails and phone calls to find the right distributor for you.
This community site is intended to provide free and open access information to help people in their research & some safety net from a supportive community if they were left without help in a post-purchase situation. But this community is limited to what help can be offered.
The community will never replace a dealer with training, experience, and knowledge, applying them all to your specific circumstances, and then seeing that through.
Your dealer should bear the responsibility of supporting you and your system. If they do not have the knowledge, then they can get training from Victron. That is how it is supposed to work. We help them, and then they help you (and others like you).
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Thanks for the reply.
I understand that customer support can be costly for companies like Victron, and that is the reason you use your current model where the sellers handle it. However, from a customer point of view it is not the best experience, because a seller usually only knows superficial things about the product, just enough to be able to sell it. I would for example not contact my representative here in Sweden, because I have done that earlier, and they didn’t know very much.
So instead I posted my question here, but it kind of just fell between chairs, because it is community driven. People chip in with what ever they happen to know, but it never becomes a support case where someone owns the case and then works to solve it.
Maybe some customers prefer this support model. I’m just giving you feedback to say that personally I don’t. I prefer the experience I had when I was a customer of Morningstar, and my controller broke. I wrote an email to them and immediately someone very knowledgeable got on the case. It gave a great feeling of confidence and that they care about me as a customer.
This topic pops up from time to time.
Ultimately it comes down to who you choose to buy from.
Users that choose lowest cost, or internet-only resellers tend to have the worst experience.
This often is the consumer/DIY driven end of the market which tends to only focus on cost, so end up with resellers who’s business model has excluded any skill from the equation to meet price points. This, coupled with, a widely varying level of technical expertise and experience in that community, actually drives up the amount of help needed - something that actually tends to be less about support and more about installation and training.
Both of these are addressed quite well through the free online resources but that few invest time into doing.
For that market, the community becomes the overflow, with some resellers actively sending people here, despite them knowing it is their responsibility.
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Sure, but it also comes down to who Victron chooses to be their representatives/resellers. But I agree that these kinds of products are both DIY and by professional installers, so a bit more time consuming to support.
Victron chooses the distribution partners, but not who they sell to. Anyone can sell their products.
If your reseller is letting you down, the distie should still help, but they will draw a line between something being broken and assistance with an installation that hasn’t gone right.
You can trace the distributor via rhe support page on the victron site.
personal experience has shown that this model is flawed…
In august I found firmware issues with the quattro firmware creating a badly unbalanced loads on Generators and the only way i could force the issue to be dealt with by victron was through this forum… while I got zero feed back - the issue was dealt with in a new firmware release a month later… it cost me a lot of money to go back and re test the new version before re-configuring 18 15kw units — just because victron did not fully test their firmware…
While I also have a good relationship with local dealers and agents they could not do anything to help… By the way they only hand on the issue to the local sales representatives while they work for victron they have no technical knowledge…
I still have a number of firmware issues that have not yet been resolved EkranoGX to LTE GSM not working GX (firmware unstable), when last tested the modTCP command for setting inverter in charge only mode still leaves the inverter output live, etc
For firmware issues ( not setup/configuration issues ) there needs to be another path for support that allows direct access to technical personal at victron. The channels you describe above would have taken months to get the issue just passed through all the non technical peoples hands. I will also point out I do not appreciate working for victron for free.
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Hi @fantail,
I always appreciate a technical user who is willing to pursue an issue.
I am the first to admit the model is not flawless. This community is my direct personal best effort contribution to trying to provide some feedback on the system so at least there are no dead ends.
I don’t know your situation or any of the people involved, so this is entirely general and there can be a lot of devil in the details.
One of the absolute best things about Victron, and the only reason our model is able to work at all is that there aren’t that many layers.
In all cases the first port of contact is with the dealer/distributor. If they cannot solve the problem or do not know the answer, then all they need to do is escalate it up and ask their Victron sales manager. They have no reason or incentive to hold onto issues that they can’t fix.
If they can’t fix them, then they need to ask Victron for help.
Victron in this case is their Victron Sales Manager (listed here - Contact - Victron Energy). The sales manager has a clear path to technical support and issue escalation internally.
They will not immediately escalate every issue, nor should they. So it might take multiple independent reports before they then escalate it, if they can’t delegate it or solve it themselves.
The details internally from there aren’t so important to make fully public, but I will say there aren’t many more steps from there to the product engineer.
This isn’t always fast, but it is fairly direct.
The only slightly more direct path is via this community, and then me. This is obviously a very constrained channel considering it is open to every single Victron user in the entire world.
So it needs the help of the community as well because most issues are not firmware issue that need an R&D engineer, but a design, installation, configuration, documentation, or expectation issue.
So all of those, which still need help, need to be ‘sorted’ out first to then leave the issues that cannot be solved by anyone else except an engineer. This is less than 0.1% of issues on this site.
On the previous community (now archive) we had some 100,000 questions, and I probably need to escalate a several hundred of them over the years, which were real bugs in production hardware or firmware.
It is in my, yours, and everyones interest to make that process of getting the 0.1% of issues to the top as smooth and fast as possible, and the other 99.9% of issues resolved without asking an engineer (who can then work on those 0.1% + new products and features).
This is already a long response, but if you are still motivated to help let me know and we can go on.
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Just as an extra note: 1. Most if not all resellers/dealers do not have access to large Multi-phase generators and large Dump loads available for testing and trouble shooting issues… This also means they are unable to test or confirm the nature of problems with these larger systems.
while I appreciate that this is a public forum - I would have preferred a more private channel - as this would have allowed a more frank exchange from both sides. And when I am on site would have allowed faster turn a rounds of SW patches that I could’ve retested while on site.
Possibly even allowing indirect access to hardware with the problems - for your staff via vpn to assist with diagnosis. ( not via VRM )
Another issue is how to upload large video files recording the issues found - my first one was 1.9GB and a side note was that once the firmware was improved it exposed another issue with one of the chargers… it is also unlikely that the local dealers will be able to test or replicate this issue due to the high currents needed to expose it.
The support option on one of you websites requires hardware serial numbers to be entered for which are not relevant when dealing with firmware issues, also I suspect is used to redirect request to a dealer.
I have also now reached out to your local Victron sales manager – we will see were that leads.
3 posts were split to a new topic: AC Out active in charger mode