Sofar solar inverter review - Updated March 2021

Are Sofar inverters any good?
"Sofar so good".
As far as reviews go, that's about all I can say to sum up this brand.

It's relatively new (2018) to the Australian market, and suffered the indignity of being rapidly de-listed by the Clean Energy Council for failing a critical safety test. Sofar flew over teams of engineers who travelled Australia manually updating firmware in all of their inverters to get the fault fixed and re-listed again.

This begs the question as to why in this day and age, the firmware couldn't be uploaded remotely? It also speaks volumes as to how important Sofar consider the Australian market because it couldn't have been cheap to send those teams out.

We recently bench-tested the single phase(model 5KTLM-G2) and three phase 5kW (model 5KTL-X) standard inverters as well as the single phase hybrid(Model HYD 5000-ES)

All of the inverters fired up just fine, the WIFI worked and apart from a rather old fashioned 'boxy' appearance there wasn't anything obvious to fault them on.
The heat sink wasn't top quality so the electronics inside will cook in our heat, so don't expect much more than the 10 year warranty out of these products, but most buyers at this price point aren't looking for the sort of life expectancy you would get out of Huawei, Fronius or SMA.

The Sofar HYD 5000-ES model supports the Sofar battery.





We've seen plenty of quotes from competitors claiming the much cheaper 5KTLM-G2 and 5KTL-X inverters are also 'battery-ready', so let's put that rubbish to bed with a photo of the KTLM-G2.

Where do they think the battery would plug-in?



The principal reason why many retailers are selling Sofar is a low price. It's cheap.

Unfortunately 'cheap' tends to attract installers who aren't all that much interested in doing a great job. We took these pictures from a solar company's website that proudly displayed their work installing Sofar inverters !!


It's not the fault of manufacturer Sofar that their products are installed as badly as the above dog's breakfast, or is it...?



Would I recommend Sofar inverters?
Hand on heart? No, not really. There are better choices. I certainly would never sell a Sofar battery. Cheap, unknown and battery are not three words that belong together.

Brochures, datasheets etc are available on the Sofar Australia website. Sofar Australia website

This review was written by Andrew MacKeith, Solar4Ever service manager since 2011.