Solis Inverter review - Updated March 2021

Are Solis inverters any good?
Solis inverters, whilst not a particular favourite of mine, aren't bad inverters at all.

If you have clicked on 'Canadian Solar Inverter review', don't worry, you are in the right place. The Canadian CSI is a re-badged Solis .

I would put them in the same boat as Growatt, SolaX and Sofar as a low cost, but perfectly adequate 'solar only' inverter.

WIFI reporting to smartphone and browser is fairly good as they all are at this price point. It's not polished like Huawei but Huawei are a huge IT company (US$140 billion sales 2020) and Solis are a smallish solar inverter manufacturer (US$40 million sales 2020) so it's to be expected.

The internal temperatures inside the Solis inverters gets pretty high on Perth hot days, which is another reason I think these inverters won't last much longer than their ten year warranty, but until ten years go by, or we start getting a lot of failures, which we are not, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

I see that Canadian Solar have released a new inverter which looks identical to the Solis, so there's likely to be an OEM re-branding going on there as Canadian Solar haven't ever done inverters before as far as I know.

Solis have a hybrid (solar and battery) range of inverters which I would not touch with the proverbial barge pole simply because as soon as you bring batteries into the equation the whole situation changes.

A normal 'solar only' inverter gets a chance to shut down, cool down, overnight, a hybrid inverter works hard 24 hours a day.

There's a lot of heat generated by the process of 'inverting', converting DC power from solar panels or battery to AC in the house, and the components inside need to be able to handle that if they are going to last.

I see Huawei and Fronius inverters, one without fans, one with, running 15°C cooler on hot Perth days than Solis and most other inverters, so clearly these companies have a better design inside.

Fronius and Huawei are the only two companies I trust to make a top quality hybrid inverter that will last long during and far beyond the ten year warranty, but if you want a regular 'solar inverter' and you don't want to pay $600 more for a Huawei and $1,000 more for a Fronius, and you don't need it for more than ten years before you move house, upgrade etc, then this brand is perfectly fine.

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