ShopSolar Reviews

I talked to ShopSolar's customer service. I was really disappointed to get a bum unit. But they didn't say, “Ship it back.” The rep just said, "Rather than ship it back to me, I'll let you be my bench technician. Let's just video right here where you can see it." He stayed on the phone with me and had me go through some things and actually take the unit apart. He could see that it was what it was and it wasn't powering up. He said, "If you're comfortable with doing this, you take out a couple of screws. We'll pop the top off... Look for this one little connection, show it to me.” And I did. The thing is really heavy. If it got jarred, the wire might come loose. We checked all that stuff, ran some quick diagnostics and he said, "No. It's just a dead unit." ShopSolar shipped me out another one and that one seems to be working just fine. I was quite happy with that.

We have a couple of solar panels with a battery. It's like charging your flashlight. You just set it out there, the panels sit outside, and they can charge up your battery. I don't have anything attached to the house. We wanted something that if we want to go camping with it, we could. We are thinking about buying an RV. We may actually bolt the panels to the top of the RV when we go. But right now, it is portable. I can just set it out on the front porch and it'll charge. And then the battery is just like having a portable jumper unit.

I wish we have a little bit of a bigger battery because it matches the amps, but then I hear the peak amps. If the compressor kicks on the refrigerator, it could peak and go within 10 watts of maxing this thing out. It really has no margin of safety at all. You're hoping that the numbers are exactly what they say they are. Machines aren't always that way. Bigger is better when you're talking about power.

All in all, ShopSolar did all right by me. I just have the one experience. I get the politics of the world and everybody shuts down. Shipping was slow for everything and everybody had delays. It was just the way things were. You gotta be happy with that. Also, the best time to buy technology is tomorrow. If I had waited a little bit longer, I probably would have got the next step up and had a little margin of safety.

Now here is my experience with ShopSolarKits. From them, I had purchased no equipment yet they worked hard to help me find a solution to my mess. In the end, I decided to can the project, pull my parts, sell everything, and forget about doing solar all-together. This understanding came after weeks of discussions with ShopSolar and my component provider. Shop Solar contacted my AHJ, and tried to find a way to make things work without me pushing more money behind a bad decision. When it became apparent that I couldn't end this jam without investing lots more funds, Shop Solar quickly and without charge, cancelled my planning order by sending me a full refund against my investment for their services. Non of it was their fault. The mistakes fell upon my rush to get into DIY solar. I give Shop Solar Kits five stars for going out of their way to easy the burden I had placed on myself. Great service, guys. Here's hats off to Shop Solar.

The new unit works beautifully and I'm very happy. I'm looking to buy my third one. The only regret I have is that technology has gotten so much better. Now they're using a LiFePo4 battery chemistry and I have the old lithium chemistry in mine. Also, the plus on LiFePo4 is that it withstands weather. When it gets really cold you don't lose power and now they're offering it in all the units. With the Max 2 that's coming out mid-June, they have a special going where you can save a couple of hundred dollars. I was looking to buy that, but it's not compatible with the one that I have because it's two different battery chemistries. I looked at trading in, but they're gonna give you $200 for a unit you spent 1,300 for.

Other than that, we have four solar panels up and for us, they work fine. We're on really low consumption. Everything is LED and we have standby generators such that if the solar generators ever get down too low, we just fire the generators and then an hour later, we're fully charged again. But the solar is nice because it doesn't let them go down so fast. I recommend ShopSolarKits. I watch a lot of the videos their guy Max does so I know what's going on from his end.

Also, I did the installation and it was horribly difficult for somebody that doesn't know anything about it. It would be a lot simpler, but it's a real joke. You have to really study solar before you can understand how to do it yourself. As far as hooking up the panels to all the fuses and how you do it and how you put everything in a series of parallel or split phase or dual phase, the average person doesn’t know anything about that. It took me months to get mine in. I still don't fully understand everything. It was a long, hard road to install the system. 90% of people who buy them can’t.

I was working with one guy who helped me program the thing when I got it all set up and was ready to program it. The next day, I had an error code and I called. The person I spoke with didn't speak good English. He answered but he didn't understand a lot about what I was talking about. I was telling him I had one particular item that was wrong. He started having me go through the programming and try different things. There are 40 different programs or so on there that you have to attend.

The day before, I was with a guy who was in the service department who was absolutely wonderful to help me set all those up and everything. But this second guy had me dissect and take apart everything the guy before did. By trial and error, he would say, “Okay. Try this,” in order to fix my error code. And I would try it. And then he'd say, “Okay. Forget that. Try this.” And I’d say, “Well, shouldn't we put the other program back to where it was?” He'd say, “No. Let's just try this.” He did it several times. He changed the program, even with all the time that I spent the day before with that other guy. He changed it all to where nothing was working then. I had to call back and go through it with someone again. It was quite a pain.

Another thing that really bothered me, is I was supposed to get Growatt inverters. That's what they showed me in the advertisement. ShopSolar sent Rich inverters and I complained about that. I don't like getting something I did not research. I researched Growatt inverters and I found out Growatt was the biggest-selling inverter in the world and one of the best ever. I've never been really happy about that either, because over at Rich Solar, their service is absolutely pitiful. It was good there for a while. They had one guy over there named Oswald who is very good. But now, Oswald won't even call me back. Now, I've been trying for over a month to get them to help me with their Wi-Fi module. That's another thing I was disappointed about. It was advertised to have a Wi-Fi module and the inverters work by Wi-Fi. Evidently, they all have not been worked out yet. I understand there's not even an app for it that was ready yet.

I called you ShopSolar and said, “Hey, where is my Wi-Fi module? I didn't know it didn't come with it.” I had to order it from Rich Solar and it was no big deal. It only cost 50 bucks. But the thing is I still, to this day, have never gotten it to work. I've called ShopSolar several times and complained about it and their service department just keeps saying they'll put in a ticket with Rich Solar. Rich Solar never calls me back about it. When I use the one app that they said to use, which everybody, when I went on YouTube and researched it, said that that app wasn't ready yet. When you go on the app and you look at it, you go to support, there's no data. You go to other functions, there's no data. Everything on the menu, there's no data. That aside the solar system is working. It’s just what I always wanted and I'm glad I don't owe money on them.

At this point, I was talking directly to DELTA PRO, the company that manufactures it. I could have talked to ShopSolar, but that introduced an extra company in the middle. So it'd be more effective just to go to the direct manufacturer and they were good. They sent me four of these suckers. I'm not really able to use it the way it's advertised, but I can work around it. It's been a while and I haven't had a problem with this one failing on me. It doesn't run everything in my RV, but it seems to pretty much work. But I cannot plug from Shore Power into the EcoFlow and just pass it through. So, after a little while, it gives up and rolls over and puts its feet in the air and croaks. The person that I was talking to at Delta Pro said that. So when I'm at Shore Power, I just bypass the EcoFlow completely and take it out of the loop. Then when I asked to travel, I just go right off the EcoFlow, but the Shore Power is not going through it.

I'd like to be able to ship the product back someday and get the newer model, but it's so hard to do that. The sucker weighs around 100 pounds and I have to lift that out of my RV and put it on the ground, and then the new one comes and I've got to lift that off the ground and put it up into my RV. I'm 70 years old. So for me to pick up 100 pounds is really risky.