Solar Inverter Warranty Claim Checklist

An inverter warranty claim in India is won or lost on paperwork, not on the length of the warranty. Most readers reach this page with a dead inverter, an invoice they cannot find, and a phone number for the wrong party. This guide is the claim process itself, step by step, from the moment the display goes dark to the moment a replacement unit is dispatched.

It assumes you already know what your warranty says. If you do not, read the warranty terms guide first, because the terms decide whether a claim is possible at all. If you are not yet certain the inverter is the faulty component, start with the troubleshooting hub. A claim raised against a healthy inverter costs you two weeks and a site visit fee.

What follows covers the evidence to gather before you call, the documents your installer should have handed over at commissioning, who to approach first among installer, distributor and manufacturer, what the manufacturer will ask for and why each item matters, the approval step that actually starts the replacement clock, the exclusions that sink claims in Indian conditions, who pays freight and labour, and what to do if a claim is refused. A printable checklist sits near the end.

Short version. To make a solar inverter warranty claim in India, first confirm the inverter is the faulty part. Then raise a ticket through your installer with the invoice, commissioning report, serial number photograph, fault code, timestamp and monitoring screenshot. The manufacturer verifies that the unit is in term and that the cause is a defect. Replacement logistics begin only after written approval.

Before you claim, confirm the inverter is the faulty part

A warranty claim is a statement that the product is defective. If the real fault sits in the array, the wiring, the earthing or the grid supply, the claim will be rejected and you will have spent two weeks proving the manufacturer right. Spend an hour on separation first.

Four different faults look identical from the ground floor.

Work through the diagnosis ladder in the troubleshooting guide before filing, and check the meaning of the code in the error code reference. Do not open the enclosure. Opening it voids the warranty on most Indian inverter policies, and it converts a claimable defect into an excluded one.

The documents you should have kept at commissioning

Every disputed claim is really a documentation dispute. The manufacturer cannot see your roof, so the file you submit is the entire factual basis of the decision. Six items do almost all the work, and all six exist on the day of commissioning. Collect them now, before anything fails, and store them in one folder with a copy in cloud storage.

1. Purchase invoice with date, seller name, GSTIN and the model as sold. This establishes the start of the term on most policies.
2. Written warranty document that applied at the time of sale, not a screenshot of a current web page. Terms change between model years.
3. Commissioning report with test readings, signed by the installer. The commissioning guide lists what a complete report contains.
4. Serial number photograph of the rating label on the unit, readable, with the model designation visible. Labels fade in sunlight within a few years.
5. Installer details, meaning the firm name, technician name, phone, and the workmanship or maintenance contract.
6. DISCOM approval and net metering paperwork, which independently proves the commissioning date if the invoice is disputed.

Two more help and cost nothing. Photograph the installation at handover, showing the mounting, the cable entry glands, the earthing connection and the protective devices. Keep the datasheet for the exact model, available from the datasheet library, because the manufacturer will check the fault against the rated limits on it.

If you cannot produce the invoice, the claim is not automatically dead. A dealer sales record, the commissioning report, or the DISCOM file can establish the date. It is slower and it depends on goodwill, which is a poor thing to rely on in year 9.

How to record the fault so it survives scrutiny

Record the fault before you touch anything. Resetting first is the single most common evidence mistake, because a reset clears the event log that would have supported your claim. The assessor is looking for a specific, timestamped, reproducible defect, and a paraphrase of what you saw last Tuesday does not qualify.

Capture six things.

1. The error code exactly as displayed, copied character for character. Codes are not standardised across brands, so a code that means an isolation fault on one unit means something else elsewhere.
2. The timestamp, to the minute, and whether the fault repeats at a particular time of day.
3. A photograph of the display or LED pattern, taken without opening the enclosure.
4. A monitoring screenshot showing the generation curve for the day, and the days before it. A curve that stops at 11:40 every morning tells a different story from one that never starts.
5. Conditions at failure: weather, whether a grid outage or voltage swing preceded it, whether a nearby lightning event occurred, whether anything else in the building tripped.
6. What you did next, including every reset, every isolator operated, and every call made, with times.

Write this as a short dated log rather than a WhatsApp thread you will have to reconstruct later. If the fault is intermittent, log each occurrence. Three dated instances of the same code are far more persuasive than one description of a persistent problem.

Who to claim against, and in what order

Three parties can be responsible and they have different roles. Readers usually call the manufacturer first, which is the slowest route, because the manufacturer’s opening question is the site diagnosis only the installer can supply.

The distinction matters commercially, not just procedurally. A fault caused by an undersized DC cable or a missing earth is an installation matter even though the inverter is what stopped working. That division is set out in the installation versus product warranty explainer, and it decides who pays.

Two practical notes. First, always obtain a ticket number in writing, from whoever you approach, and quote it in every later message. Second, if the installer has closed down, go to the manufacturer’s service network directly rather than to a random local technician. Qbits lists its authorised service partners in a published locator, and the authorised service partner directory is the route to a technician whose diagnosis the manufacturer will accept. An unauthorised repair, however competent, is an exclusion on most policies.

What the manufacturer will ask for, and why each item matters

The request list looks bureaucratic. It is not. Each item exists to answer one specific question the assessor has to answer before approving a claim, and knowing the question tells you what a good answer looks like.

Send everything in one submission, named clearly. A claim that arrives in eleven separate messages over five days is assessed on day five, not day one. This is the part of the timeline you control completely, and it is the part most claimants lose the most time on.

Expect a remote diagnosis step before any site visit. A meaningful share of reported inverter failures are settings, communication or grid issues that a support engineer can identify from the log. Cooperate with it. Refusing remote diagnosis reads as an attempt to skip the step that would have disproved the claim.

Approval, not complaint, starts the dispatch clock

A 72 hour dispatch figure circulates widely in the Indian inverter market, and you may well be quoted it. Treat it carefully for two reasons. Qbits’ public documents do not state a dispatch commitment, so ask for the committed action in writing rather than relying on the number. And every version of it starts at claim approval, not at your first call, so it was never a promise that a working inverter reaches your roof three days after you notice a fault.

Approval gates three things: whether the unit is in term, whether the cause is a covered defect rather than an excluded event, and which remedy applies. Everything before approval, meaning diagnosis, document verification and any site inspection, sits outside whatever dispatch window you are quoted. Its duration depends mostly on the completeness of your file.

So the honest timeline has two halves.

Qbits publishes no average time from complaint to approval, no approval rate, and no current written dispatch commitment, so treat any number you are quoted verbally as an estimate and ask for it in writing. When you raise the ticket, ask two questions directly: what evidence is still outstanding, and what the target date for the approval decision is. Both answers are useful and neither is a commitment you are inventing on the manufacturer’s behalf.

The practical consequence is a planning one. Your system will be down for the whole pre-approval period plus logistics plus refitting, not for the dispatch window alone. For commercial sites, that is the number to model, and the wider service response problem in the Indian market is covered in our note on service response in Indian solar.

What typically voids an inverter warranty in India

Exclusions are not fine print. They are the substance of the decision, and in Indian rooftop conditions most rejected claims fall into a handful of categories. None of them is about the electronics.

Earthing deserves separate attention because it causes both real failures and rejected claims. Indian practice is governed by IS 3043:2018 for earthing and IS 732:2019 for wiring installations, both published by the Bureau of Indian Standards. If the earth was never tested at commissioning, you have no evidence on the question that matters most, which is why the commissioning report belongs in the file. The earthing entry in our glossary covers the mechanism.

The contrarian point: an IP66 enclosure rating, which Qbits lists for every series in its product data, is not a defence against water ingress through a badly fitted cable gland. The rating applies to the enclosure as designed and closed correctly. Water that enters through an upward-facing unsealed gland entered through an installation defect, and that is how the assessor will classify it. The same logic applies to heat. A unit mounted in a closed, unventilated shaft will derate and eventually fail, and the manual’s clearance requirement is what the manufacturer will point to.

Surge damage is the one exclusion with a clean alternative route. It is normally an insurance claim rather than a warranty claim, and the solar insurance guide covers what a policy needs to say for that to work.

Who pays freight, labour and scaffolding

Here is the surprise that catches most claimants. An approved claim is not a cost free claim. Most Indian inverter warranties cover the product, meaning the repair or the replacement unit, and exclude everything required to get the old one down and the new one working.

The usual exclusions are removal and refitting labour, recommissioning and reconfiguration, two-way transport of the faulty and replacement units, transit risk, technician travel, and access equipment such as scaffolding, a ladder platform or a crane. Some policies cover freight one way only. A few cover labour for an initial period and not afterwards. The only way to know is the clause in your own document.

Scale the access line and the answer changes shape. A large unit on a factory roof needing a crane, two technicians and freight on a transporter can push the direct cost several times higher, which is why commercial buyers negotiate labour and freight into the supply contract rather than relying on the warranty. Where a maintenance contract exists, it often absorbs the labour line, and our AMC cost guide covers what that typically includes.

One structural point worth knowing. Under the MNRE operational guidelines for PM Surya Ghar (Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, 2024, with the MNRE-hosted text reaffirmed in July 2025), a registered vendor owes a 5 year Comprehensive Maintenance Contract from commissioning on a subsidised residential system. If your system took the central subsidy, check that contract before paying an installer for warranty-related labour.

Replacement or repair, and the term a replacement carries

The remedy is the manufacturer’s choice on most policies, not yours. Repair, replacement with an equivalent unit, supply of parts, or a credit note are all recognised remedies, and a document that says “repair or replace at the company’s option” means exactly that.

For Qbits, the remedy is one of the four items the public material leaves open, alongside the base term, the registration deadline and the exclusions. So the question to put in writing is a direct one: if this unit fails in year seven, do you repair it, replace it, or issue a credit, and who pays freight and labour. A document naming replacement with an equivalent unit is a stronger position than one reserving repair at the company’s option, because it removes the argument about whether a repaired board is as good as a new one. How to read a headline duration against a competitor’s is covered in the 12 year warranty analysis.

Three things to settle in writing when a replacement is agreed.

1. The remaining term. Unless the document says otherwise, a replacement inherits only the balance of the original term. A unit replaced in year 9 of a 12 year term carries roughly 3 years, not a fresh 12.
2. The model supplied. An equivalent unit may not be identical. Confirm that ratings, MPPT count and communication interface suit the existing array and monitoring, so you are not left with a new inverter and a string configuration it cannot accept.
3. The old unit. Returning the faulty inverter is normally a condition of replacement. Do not scrap it, and photograph it before it leaves site.

If the claim is refused, escalation routes inside India

A refusal is a decision, and decisions can be challenged. What cannot be challenged is a verbal refusal. So the first move after any rejection is a written one: ask for the refusal on letterhead or email, naming the specific exclusion clause relied on and the diagnosis it rests on.

Then work the ladder in order. Skipping steps weakens the later ones, because each forum asks what you did before you arrived.

1. Written refusal with reasons. Request the clause, the diagnosis, and the evidence relied on. Ask for the technician’s report.
2. Rebut on the evidence, not the tone. If the refusal blames earthing, produce the commissioning earth test. If it blames the grid, produce your logged voltage data. Most reversals happen here.
3. Escalate inside the service structure. Go through an authorised service partner to the regional or national service head, quoting the ticket number and the dated history.
4. Independent technical opinion. A report from a qualified third party electrical contractor, dated and signed, converts your position from an assertion into evidence.
5. PM Surya Ghar grievance route, if the system was subsidised. The MNRE operational guidelines set a 30 day clock for grievance resolution, and MNRE publishes a grievance call centre on 15555 operating in 12 languages (Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, 2026).
6. National Consumer Helpline. Pre-litigation mediation through the helpline on 1915 is free and often faster than a filing.
7. Consumer commission complaint. Under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 (Government of India), you may complain about a defect in goods or a deficiency in service. Section 69 sets a limitation of 2 years from the cause of action. Filing is possible online through the e-Daakhil portal. Jurisdiction follows the Consumer Protection (Jurisdiction of the District Commission, the State Commission and the National Commission) Rules, 2021: District Commission up to ₹50 lakh, State Commission above ₹50 lakh and up to ₹2 crore, National Commission above ₹2 crore.

For most residential inverter disputes, the District Commission is the relevant forum and the claim value is the cost of the unit plus consequential loss. Keep in mind what a commission is actually deciding: whether the seller or manufacturer failed to honour a stated term. That makes the written warranty document, not the advertisement, the centre of your case.

The claim-preparation checklist

Work top to bottom. Items 1 to 8 happen before you call anyone.

The Bottom Line

A warranty claim is an evidence exercise with a technical subject. The manufacturer decides on the file in front of them, so the claimant who assembled the file at commissioning wins faster than the one assembling it during an outage. The two facts most worth internalising: the product warranty covers the inverter and not the installation around it, and the published dispatch window starts at claim approval rather than at your first complaint.

• Build the file today, before anything fails: invoice, written warranty terms, commissioning report with earth test readings, serial number photograph, installation photographs, installer contract.
• Before filing, rule out array, grid and monitoring faults, and record the code, timestamp, display photograph and monitoring screenshot without resetting the unit.
• Confirm the written warranty terms for your exact model, including remedy, exclusions, freight and labour liability, through the datasheet library and by contacting Qbits before you buy, not after a fault. The eleven clauses to request lists exactly what that document should contain.