Be careful with your generalizations. This distributor has two master degrees, spent 25 years in designing disaster-tolerant datacenter solutions for the largest corporations in the world, whose business holds an electrical contractors license, has both ME and EE’s on the payroll, and I am personally sitting for the master electrician and electrical contractor exams this Fall. (I’m the owner). With our combined experience, there are probably very few distributors in the USA who can match our skills. There are plenty of box-pushers out there and technicians who have enough experience to solve 80% of issues they’ll encounter and know how to properly install common systems. In the USA, most of these people are focused on RV and marine solutions or small off-grid solutions for cabins. Victron doesn’t provide very many AC products for the USA so most of the experienced Victron installers here are limited to mobility experience. Even with that, we’ve designed and installed Victron systems ranging from powering a single POE camera on a pole to very large three phase systems to condition power and provide power for automobile manufacturers.
I’m not saying this to toot my own horn (well, maybe just a little *smirk*) but to point out that distributors run the gamut from box pushers only to highly experienced engineers who have seen and solved a lot of problems over the years. The issues specifically to Victron as I see it are: 1. Distributors aren’t supposed to escalate within Victron themselves. Instead, we’re supposed to work through our already overly burdened sales managers who routinely travel 50-75% of the time. Getting timely responses is often not possible, which is why experienced distributors know who to contact inside of Victron Energy when there is a truly urgent need and also know to only play those cards when it’s really necessary. With great respect to them, I have dropped meetings on Matthijs calendar and he’s attended the meeting! I’ve called Johannes Boonstra’s cell phone and he answered and knew who I was. They know I’m vocal, speak my mind, but am also courteous and helpful back to Victron.
Number 2, Victron doesn’t differentiate between box sellers and value-added distributors and allow distributors to sell on Amazon. That causes a lot of trouble for value-added distributors because these buyers then start war dialing distributors they find on Victron’s website asking for help on something they purchased elsewhere. Personally, I don’t think Victron should allow online sales anywhere except the distributors’ own web commerce sites OR Victron should be the only company to sell Victron products on Amazon and then be required to support those customers.
All in all, however, I favor Victron’s current approach with just some small changes. They push a lot of responsibilities down to distributors but also provide a lot of support to distributors. Having worked at Hewlett-Packard back in the day, and a couple of VAR’s after that, I have a good idea of distribution models from OEMs down to small installers. Victron’s approach largely works and could be made better with some tweaks.
Cheers to all the distributors who spend their time - unpaid - to help answer questions on this forum, and regularly put up with abuse from naive dealers, installers, and end users. Thankfully, by and large the culture and tone of this community is really good.
Salute!
I know them generally, however. I also know to look for a voltage drop across a diode, but I couldn’t tell you when a zener diode is preferred. But, I’m not engineering power electronics, I’m integrating power electronics. Fortunately, I have an EE on staff (he’s semi-retired) who holds 75 patents and can design just about any circuit we’d ever need. lol
