So essentially, they decided to disable all the grey imports.
On the other hand of the spectrum, so I heard via the grapevine, a warehouse was robbed and a decision had to be made by the company about whether the products will be disabled if they ever come online. Because such things tend to hurt the brand more than what you already lost in the theft, the company decided not to do that. There is however no warranty on such products.
Oh this allows for some juicy imaginings.
The incoming government don’t have a record of getting on well with China, and they are busy rattling sabres again before they are even in the White House. So maybe someone in China decides to show what can be done if you want to play real hard ball, show that the USA may be more dependant on Chinese products than it had imagined.
I’d think this is the sane way to handle it. Grey import = find your own support or pay for it. Disabling is such a low move!
Truth be told, whilst I engage in wild imagingings about China cocking a snook at Trump, or hackers trying to devalue one brand to favour another, I think the most likely explanation, prosaic as it may be, is a straightforward glitch in a piece of software somewhere, or an operator error.
I agree with you. The problem is if the items look identical, then “those” customers take chances and blame the OEM.
And that is a rather big thing to sort, when “those” customers get very loud and therefor support for the “sheeples” who don’t know their left from their right.
The minorities in todays connected world causing drama for the majority.
Dye apparently responded. They said the system does its own safety check, and they did not disable the systems remotely.
(Edit: As a software developer, the most likely way this “safety check” works is looking up its own geographical location and deciding it is installed in the wrong place… which really doesn’t help to sell what they did here).
It is however unclear whether this check may have been snuck in in a recent firmware update. If it was, then technically, you could argue it was indeed disabled remotely.
Also, there are some legalities involved here and the law in the USA will eventually determine whether they are in the right or the wrong here. First, the equipment has to be UL listed, which some grey imports may not be. And second, Dye has contractual obligations towards their distributor.
Whether those legal rights and obligations are high enough that you can disable a customer’s equipment, as if his ownership of the kit is the least of the three, that is something I cannot say. To my South African sensibilities, that seems like an overstep.
On this topic though: I was under the impression that a similar “distributorial” agreement exists re Sunsynk and Dye. Sunsynk has the rights to sell these inverters in SA, and I heard that there were objections in the past to Dye being sold alongside it. This is something I’d like to learn more about.
One of the issues is that the display clearly states to call SolArk, so this will do more damage to their reputation than just leaving the grey imports. But I am probably going to put my Chinese inverter on my IOT VLAN that has no internet. I have heard a rumor that they open a VPN to China for support in some cases. But putting an untrusted device on your home network should be avoided.
Honestly, I cannot fault them for that really. The Victron GX device does something quite similar. It is not a full VPN, but when remote support is on, a technician can technically get to anything that is on your network. This is useful, when diagnosing problems with PV inverters and other external devices on that LAN, but is obviously an extremely powerful tool. You either trust your supplier with that power, or you don’t.
Many buy off-the-shelve routers to connect to the internet.
They don’t change the default password.
Similar sad situation is busy developing in SA. One of the biggest importers of sunsynk lost/gave up his deal with Sunsynk. He was behind the extended warranty deal where you would receive a 10 year warranty if you match Sunsynk inverters with Branded Sunsynk batteries (That were not sunsynk batteries at all but carried a sunsynk sticker) .
Now that they are parting ways, Sunsynk said that they will not honor the 10 year warranty as it was not them offering it to the market. Should you have a claim, speak to the importer, not us.
In principle I agree with the method of support, but I want final control over when they can enable it.
There is also a difference between trusting someone once, and trusting them forever.
Which brings us back to grey market inverters. I’ve written before about my experiences when working for a franchisee who had to deal with “parallel imports”. The real victims are the people who were sold this stuff without being told that it is not imported by the franchise holder and thus they may find difficulty in making claims under the supposed warranty.
There’s another reason this functionality exists.
A friend of ours has solar, but under a rent-to-buy deal. Now suppose somebody enters into one of these deals, gets the kit installed, and then a few months later tells the blank to block the debit order. Now the only recourse the renting company has is to disable the inverter.
Is “grey” import illegal or do they own “grey” import devices that they can remotey connect and make unauthorized changes?
What sol ark did is that they illegaly hacked into someone’s hardware and want a ransom (they want the owner to spend $ on them). They not only hacked the hardware, they hacked using my internet infrastructure. Surely this cannot be legal.
Personally i’m not using Deye’s dongles but Solar Assistant Raspberry PI based controller connected to my 4 x 5KW inverters in parallel. So i should be safe from hacking…
Well, according to the article, it was not Sol-Ark that did it, but Deye. (At some expense to Sol-Ark’s reputation.)
It seems the article has been updated quite a lot since I posted it. All signs point to a firmware update that enabled some region locking. If that is the case, it should in theory be possible to downgrade the firmware. My experience is that many Chinese inverters don’t burn the protection fuses in their DSPs, so it could even be possible to read the firmware from a good inverter and program it to an “updated” inverter.
I would not be surprised if Sol-Ark “requested” it, in the shape of complaining to Dye that their sales are impacted by illegally imported products that is against the terms of the distributors agreement.
Somewhere on a developer’s issue tracker, a feature was requested for such a locking feature. Once it was developed, it probably got rolled out to devices, and nobody knew about it. And then, once it was all ready, the concerns of Everex, Sunsynk and Sol-Ark was addressed. The developer ticked all three the tickboxes on the issue, and closed it. Success.
Reminds me of the ending of Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy, where the Vogons destroy the earth 5 minutes before the program (that calculates the question to which 42 is the answer) finishes, killing off 10 million years of work. A Vogon bureaucrat ticks the box and closes the case. All done.
Computer’s name was Deep Thought if memory serves that calculated the answer. Then it designed a new program / computer to succeed him to rather calculate the Ultimate Question, seeing as wrong question was asked. 
I agree that’s probably what happened, but I don’t think the outcome was exactly what they anticipated. Well at least not the part where “Sol-Ark” gets displayed on the screen.