Hi all, I am new in this Forum.Also playing wir Axpert and Axpert type inverters

and have my fair share of smoke signals - some times without any reason....

I like to share my experiences such as importing complete Main boards.I purchase 3 NEW boards - at least that is what I thought.

None of them worked ... have a look at the bridges on these board component sets. These boards are supposed to be for the

same inverter

My inverters are still under warrantee - as replacement I received a bag of components from the factory - some of them not bigger as an Ant ....

Man.... I've had my share of bridges when hand-soldering things... that is okay when you are a hobbyist. This is not :-)

16 hours ago, Wolf51 said:

Hi all, I am new in this Forum.Also playing wir Axpert and Axpert type inverters

Hi Wolf, just for interest sake. Which inverter is this?

This is and Axpert type inverter virtually indentical to MUST inverter, RCI and so on and is made by SUNRAY in Foshan

Seems like all the soldering were done by hand. I had the privilege of visiting a few PC board manufacturing and assembly plants in China and were surprised by the quality, there is no comparison between what I saw there and the pictures you posted. These guys looks like amateurs. 

Apologies for being blunt, but I am shocked by what I see. 

2 minutes ago, Jaco de Jongh said:

Seems like all the soldering were done by hand

Maybe it was repaired-touched-up by hand. Not uncommon. Car makers also have a "hospital dept", if a fault is picked up on the assembly line and it will take too long to clear it, the finish building the car and fix the problem by hand later. I can foresee that with PCBs you might also finish building it and repair the badly testing things later.

It does look as if it is covered in conformal coating, so it seems weird that it was hand assembled.

1 minute ago, plonkster said:

Maybe it was repaired-touched-up by hand

Agree, but look at the inconsistency on the rest of the soldering.. just doesnt look right..

3 minutes ago, Jaco de Jongh said:

Agree, but look at the inconsistency on the rest of the soldering.. just doesnt look right..

Yup. However you slice it... QA fail.

I wouldn't assume those are made by Voltronic. Voltronic Power Tech is a Taiwanese company with factories in mainland China whose product is sold under many brands. But there is also at least one mainland Chinese company that is making poor quality look-alikes. One such brand is "Must". "Sunray" may be another. AFAIK Voltronic doesn't have any factory in Foshan. See http://www.voltronicpower.com/factory.php

Gotta love the stirring music and those Chinglish captions.

You should at least watch the boardroom presentation scene from 3:55 to 4:47, then check out what (or who) they were really talking about, here: http://forums.aeva.asn.au/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=4332&p=59963#p59963

Edited November 1, 20186 yr by weber

Yes Plongster you are right. Our second import from this company was halted due to a fault they had detected in the equipment.

My guess is that they are now patching up the faulty boards and sell them as new. I worked there for 6 1/2 years and you can get

good quality out of China. ZL Power and MUST operating the same way - but still I had to pay USD 180.00 plus fright per board.

I do this because of our service policies towards our customers. All faults are repaired in 24hrs - having now 3 faulty boards troughs

a big spanner into our gears. As to Weber,s comment - in an attempt to rid myself of importing myself, I purchased 6 units 5KVA from EASY POWER.

These are supposed to be genuine VOLTRONIX - all of them failed within the first week of installation.One of my clients took matters in his own hands

and EASY POWER where just making excuses. He got his hands on the General Manager of VOLTRONIX which apparently sits in Australia now. They

finally got EASY POWERS's ass into gear. So I try now to buy them out from SEGEN SOLAR - there is a guarantee letter on their website. Have a look at it and let me know what you notice.

Sure I did query this .... you don't want to know the answer

 

Warranty Certificate - Mustek SA.pdf

To really make this Buck fat and put things into perspective - our son, my wife is Chinese, works or

by now did work for ZL Power in Shenzhen and seen the owners father collect faulty boards without 

obvious burn marks, send for warranty exchange and sell them right out to the next victim

15 minutes ago, Wolf51 said:

really make this Buck fat

Is that an expression in Mandarin? I love the little quirks in languages (eg in German, when you dance on someone's nose). This means add insult to injury?

Hi Plongster, yes, that is sort of and expression, you got this about right - I am German ex SIEMENS. Just trying to share my experiences with you guys

about China and the business ethics applied there. One thing you need to know is that there are 2 China's. The one is that you

see (being shown) as a prospective client and the other one, when you live there day by day - I got stuck there for more then 6 years (normally German companies change their QC guys every 2 years), then my head gave up.

I even made a desperate attempt to learn Mandarin (or putong hua as it is known in China) only to find out that at the next street corner they speak some thing else.

In the end I followed the advise of an old Chinese guy who told me "stuff the language but study the culture" - the later works .....

4 hours ago, Jaco de Jongh said:

Seems like all the soldering were done by hand.

A board like that would take hours to hand solder. Chinese labour is relatively cheap, but I don't believe even the Chinese don't do things like that any more. 

The clincher is the red stuff you see under all the components on this side. This is extremely tenacious glue (you'll know what I mean if you've ever tried to take off a component glued with that stuff), used to hold components on the underside of a board that is wave soldered for the handful of through-hole parts (large capacitors, IGBTs, etc). Though I have to admit I only see that on the first of the three boards.

Those sorts of quality control issues suggest (to me at least) a clone maker, not an experienced, volume manufacturer like Voltronic Power. Of course, everyone is human, and the QA workers could have had a really bad day, but these things get extensively tested, and at least two of those boards obviously couldn't have passed any sort of functional test. By far the most complex command in an Axpert's firmware is one of the test commands; the control flow diagram is a work of fine art. There would be hundreds of steps involved in the testing, as you would expect for something as complex as an inverter-charger with integrated MPPT and fast bypass switch. So my guess is that a set of clone boards ended up in the supply chain somehow. The boards looks genuine to me, and I've seen a few of them (not dozens), but that's based on three partial-board photos, and probably merely attests to the ability of the cloners to clone really well. 

51 minutes ago, Coulomb said:

A board like that would take hours to hand solder.

Dont seem to get my point over the way I intended. Let me try again, the soldering imo is so inconsistent that it looks like its been done by hand. It most probably wasn't, I was merely  commenting on its appearance.. 

1 hour ago, Coulomb said:

Those sorts of quality control issues suggest (to me at least) a clone maker.... ... The boards look genuine to me, ... but that ... probably merely attests to the ability of the cloners to clone really well. 

You're almost contradicting yourself here. i.e. I was tempted to say, "Either they cloned badly or they cloned well. You can't have it both ways."

I think Wolf51's guess is more likely to be true. i.e. that these were manufactured by Voltronic, but have failed and been poorly repaired by someone.

Thank you all for your contribution and opinions. I really appreciate it - does not make me feel so alone.

In the meantime I will continue my fight with the factory in order to get some replacements. I have been promised 

a bag of "spare parts" - lets see. At least I do not have completely lost my mind judging by your comments.

A little encouragement goes a long way. Thanks again and Coulomb, you are right, this is really nasty sticky stuff

as I have tried to get them off one board and put it back on another board which I deemed to have some hope to get

to work. It simply can not be done ...... will keep you posted