I need to vent, because I’ve never experienced such poor support for such important components!
I received no support from Victron. If you open a ticket with Victron, you’re forwarded to a dealer who’s supposed to handle it. The only response you usually get is, “Ask the community.” I do and did and some things are not known here by the community, of course. That’s it, and that’s why Victron support is “poor” in my opinion! Even when I go through the local dealer, I only get a two-syllable reply after many weeks or months. All in all – “UNACCEPTABLE”!!
Victron doesn’t provide direct support to end users. That’s what the dealer network is for. In turn, the dealer who sold you the equipment is responsible for providing both warranty and post-warranty service.
Also, if you purchased the equipment and chose to carry out the installation yourself, the dealer is not obliged to resolve your issues free of charge or to provide installation guidance during operation. That was your decision, and it’s your responsibility.
If you want to pass all of this work and responsibility onto someone else, you need to commission design and installation from a certified specialist.
So, your problems are your problems, you wanted to save money, didn’t you?
Don’t attack me personally! You have no idea what I did and why I had to do it. It has nothing to do with the topic!
When a company outsources support, it usually has only one purpose: to avoid tying up its own resources and to outsource the costs. Every company I know has regretted it in the end, but I don’t care. The quality of support decreases because external providers, i.e., resellers, can never have the same level of expertise as the company’s own technicians, and that’s been my experience as well. As soon as things get complicated, you’re referred to the community.
And based on my own experience, I’d say the community can help in 90% of cases. So what’s stopping you from describing your problem in detail here, instead of just venting?
This forum is a treasure trove of knowledge that no support team in the world can match…
You’re being overly sensitive, nobody’s attacking you.
In fact, it’s you making an unfounded attack against the manufacturer.
Your personal perception, filtered through your own experience, is the result of the decisions you’ve made. So don’t lump everything together.
Victron support is structured the way it is, with part of the workload delegated to dealers and installers. But when people choose to act independently, assuming it’s like a Lego kit in order to save money, that becomes their share of the responsibility.
Dealers and distributors are under no obligation to train you or provide support beyond warranty commitments, such as offering operational guidance or explaining how to carry things out within an installation. Simply selling equipment does not include design work or system configuration.
That’s why you’re quite rightly being directed here, to the community.
If you make the effort to spend some time and start studying the issues you’re interested in, you’ll find plenty of information, and your questions will be answered, provided they’re properly formulated.
My clients don’t ask me any questions or seek support, because they receive a complete solution tailored to their needs.
If you decide to save money, be prepared to invest your time and learn, that’s simply how it works.
Just a question.
Does Victron also outsource their software?
I found a software issue with the by Victron advised EM540 grid meter in VRM, and I don’t get an answer here in this forum if the VRM team wants to look at the issue or not, absolute silence for several days now.
This is very frustrating!!!
And this is not the way how you improve your software,…
I’m not an employee of Victron. I’m just a regular contractor working on the design and installation of systems based on equipment from various manufacturers.
Issues with external meters do crop up from time to time, even with those recommended by Victron.
This is often discussed in the relevant Venus OS beta-testing threads, where identified issues and their causes are covered, and a changelog is published for each release.
Ich habe mal durch deine Themen geschaut und die meisten bewegen sich sowieso außerhalb des offiziellen Supports (NodeRed, DIY Akku), da brauchst du von den meisten Händlern oder Victron keine Unterstützung zu erwarten.
Die meisten Händler/Installateure beschäftigen sich nur mit dem, was offiziell mit Victron Komponenten möglich ist, sie können und müssen darüber hinaus keinen Support geben.
Hier in der Community kann man zu solchen Dingen ggf. Unterstützung bekommen, aber das ist nicht garantiert.
Auch wenn hier ein paar Mitarbeiter vertreten sind, ist die Community keine offizielle Support-Seite, hier helfen sich die Nutzer gegenseitig.
That’s a good one
No way a distributor or installer can solve this issue.
It took me weeks to report the EM540 frequency was not updated in node red, now fixed.
The SOC 15 minutes issue is now also fixed, several people reported this issue and I was one of them.
Victron even got access to mine system for testing!
Main function of a home battery is charging and discharging according target SOC, but maybe not that important in other application?
In the months it took to solve the SOC issue, Victron decided that Shelly integration had more priority than SOC!
I don’t say this minor issue with the frequency resolution in a VRM widget is very important.
A simple we noticed this issue and we fix it in next release would be more than enough.
Maybe a simple to do list or a list with known issues in this forum, would avoid a lot of these discussions,…
It is a big problem even for us installers that we cannot get high-quality support directly from Victron. I mainly work with Victron installations in buildings, and our reseller is in the boating industry, so getting the right help there is out of the question. If I try to contact Victron for direct technical support, I am automatically redirected to the reseller associated with the serial number of the equipment. It is completely unacceptable and not how we are used to being treated in the electrical installation industry.
The Victron Ecosystem is extremely complicated and even with intense use of KI issues remain unclear – if you know what you need and how you want to do it KI is a huge help. If you try to plan all by yourself from scratch without deep knowledge of the ecosystem you are lost.
So I was asking several dealers for help (“Which device is better for my usecase?” / “Should I better go to the left or to the right? / “What is your experience …?”). Answer from ALLE DEALERS I contacted: “No support for DIY-constructions - only for B2B.” Private Makers are welcome as customers, but don’t ask anything.
I have an electrician who will help me building up my off-grid system, but he is not deep into PV. It took me about one year from the first ideas (of expanding my “balcony-PV” to a medium sized off-grid system) to today’s hopefully final solution.
It would have been really helpful if I’d found ready-made solutions online that I could have used as a guide. There are YouTube videos, sure, but the use cases are fundamentally different from mine and those people don’t know how to explain clearly and concisely what they’ve built, why they did it that way rather than another and why they have used these components. OR they do not include the specific german regulations.
That makes me all the more grateful to have found this forum, which is still largely free of trolls, where you can ask what might seem like a stupid question, and where neither the question nor the person asking it is immediately dismissed as too stupid to use this venerable forum.
Thanks for your help – and you can be assured that I will publish my solution answering all those questions I had in the past year.
I built and commissioned my system myself due to a lack of alternatives. The local electrician had no knowledge of Victron, and neither did the dealer from whom I purchased the equipment. Installation by a professional company was unfortunately not possible (the distance and price expectations were, to put it mildly, outrageous and would have stifled the entire project).
Inquiries are always forwarded, and it takes weeks, even months, for a terse response, if any at all!
I was only able to solve my system, which is anything but ordinary, with the help of the community (here and elsewhere); it simply wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
Other manufacturers don’t offer the features I wanted and have now achieved. One year of planning, six months of setup until everything was up and running, and since yesterday, everything is running from the living room, including battery backup. Control of the two Cerbo amplifiers, top balancing, integration of various existing PVs, etc. I’m now satisfied and don’t believe that a professional company would have, could have, or wanted to implemented my project.
This isn’t meant to be a hate thread; it’s intended to encourage the techies who frequent this forum to think about this and share the facts. I certainly hope it reaches someone and leads to a change of heart at Victron in the future. Ultimately, it’s the customers who generate the company’s revenue.
I had a Victron Inverter fail after about a year after I installed it. I called the dealer I bought it from, 24 hrs later I had a return authorization shipping label for FEDEX emailed to me, next day FEDEX picked it up. Wow I was impressed. The unit was sent to a repair shop about 50 miles from me. That shop kept it for over a month, would not respond to my calls. So I have to say that Victron is the best in my opinion as far as quality. Their response was great but their repair depot was not. When you live off-grid you can’t wait weeks or months for a repair. I guess my point is Victron needs to hold the feet of the repair depots to the fire when they don’t provide timely service. After all we did pay a premium price for this quality product!
