What’s the life expectancy of an inverter?

There are a lot of manufacturers of inverters and essentially they all do the sane thing; convert DC to AC.

We always get the question why do inverters break or what’s the life expectancy of an inverter. The reason why inverters stop working is down to capacitors. There are electrolyctic capacitors in inverters that over time, much like a normal battery run dry and simply stop working. The build quality of an inverter is very important and the main factor that causes the capacities to dry out is heat. Manufacturers put the capacitors in cooler areas of the inverter to prolong the life. Some inverters have fans which allow an air flow to cool the inverter and capacitors. We’ve found that a fault with the fan has often been the reason why the inverter has over heated and subsiquentky broken.

We would normally recommend a straight swap of the existing inverter unless our technicians believe you would benefit from a different size or manufacturer. Without knowing individual solar systems it is impossible to say until we have a certain amount of information from you.

Will the price decrease in the next few years? The price of inverters has decreased over the years but looking ahead to the future will it decrease more is impossible to say. It could be asked the other way, will inverters increase in price in the next few years. As new models come out older models will devalue but its fair to say the price difference will be minimal.