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We need laws to prevent this
by boredatoms 2y ago
We need laws to prevent this
- jfengel 2y agoThere probably are. But it appears to be coming out of China, so good luck enforcing it.
- dymk 2y agoThere is a US based company that is importing and selling these devices. Go after them.
- 4ntiq 2y ago[flagged]
- Schiendelman 2y agoFor what? They didn't send the signal.
- dymk 2y agoSo? They’re responsible for importing the devices. They have an exclusive contract. Do your due diligence before offloading the risk to your customers. It’s like if Ford outsourced faulty brake systems, had a bunch of cars crash because of it, and then say “it’s not our fault, we didn’t actually make the brake system”.
- jfengel 2y ago[flagged]
- dymk 2y ago> You can close down the (smallish, veteran-owned) American company. This is marketing fluff from the company. Who cares that they're vet-owned? They've been around for 10 years, they are not new to the solar game. They even claim to be an industry leader, if we're trusting their word. > It would be great if American companies did more due diligence, but that increases costs. How much is it going to cost to either replace all the inverters sold, or remedy whatever the gripe is with the manufacturer? How much is the outage going to cost across the (tens? hundreds?) of thousands of inverters sold?
- anon84873628 2y agoY'all realize that Sol-Ark devices are the ones that didn't shut down, right? Because they're the ones with the exclusive contract. You're hypothesizing about the exact opposite of the real situation.
- Schiendelman 2y agoI don't think that analogy holds. The brake system wasn't faulty. Someone deliberately sabotaged it after it was sold.
- ericd 2y agoI don’t think it’s the Sol-Ark branded inverters that shut down, but Deye inverters that people imported via eg aliexpress?
- _trampeltier 2y agoIt seems they shut the inverters down because a legal dispute. So the reason is the law.
- Dylan16807 2y agoThat's like saying if I punch someone because of a legal dispute, the law is to blame.
- perihelions 2y agoCivil contract disputes don't empower or obligate you to commit crimes in the process of trying to make things right. The power inverters were *not their property*. Remotely accessing them, without authorization and with the intent of disabling them, is a textbook CFAA felony.
- HackOfAllTrades 2y agoTheir 'right' to do that was probably somewhere in unreadable ALL CAPS on a small piece of paper at the bottom of the shipping box that the end user never got. Fuck 'em. Isolate your local net from the world and only let through devices you trust. Plenty of ways to do that, even at low expense. But you will have to make the effort or pay someone else to do it.
- anon84873628 2y agoNot to mention the slight complication of the entity is not in your jurisdiction and subject to your laws. You buy a device from an intermediary and it phones home to a foreign jurisdiction. That sucks but I'm not sure what recourse you can realistically expect.
- account42 2y agoThe US is plenty capable of making any entity they want fall under their jurisdiction.
- rvba 2y agoCould USA wrap it under the terrorism laws?
- gdjskshh 2y agoWe have those laws. You return the faulty device to the entity you purchased it from. I bet some small-time installers that were sourcing on the grey market will go bankrupt because of this.
- malfist 2y agoYou return a solar inverter you already have installed? Maybe purchased years ago? And in the meantime you might be without power. That's not recourse.
- hedora 2y agoThe law needs to be updated for things with high installation costs. For example, we bought a built-in oven, and post-sale we discovered a sticker saying that by using the oven, we agreed to a EULA and binding arbitration, and to return it if we disagree. I think that, had we decided to decline the previously-undisclosed EULA, the manufacturer should have had to either provide one that works as they advertised (no EULA) and with identical dimensions, or they should have had to replace our brand-new cabinets with ones that matched a competitor’s product (and incur a large multiple of the cost we paid for the oven).
- malfist 2y agoCompletely agree. Those things make even less since in the second hand market. What happens if the solar system was bought from a resaler? Or install by another company and you didn't choose it? What happens when you sell your house and you've removed the sticker?
- anon84873628 2y agoWell, did you try to decline? How do you know what would or wouldn't happen?
- malfist 2y agoPlease engage in honest discourse. Both of us know that if you take a range back to best buy because you wouldn't agree to the EULA isn't going to cause best buy to send you all new cabinets