Australia’s MIL-Solar Eclipse Inverter: An Installer’s Review

If you haven’t heard of the Australian-made MIL-Solar Eclipse inverter, you wouldn’t be alone. Find out more about this interesting solar inverter; manufactured in Melbourne.

Transcript begins —

Finn: For our installer profile this month, we’re chatting to Melbourne company Essential Solar about their business and why the inverter of choice for many of their installations is the Victorian-made MIL-Solar Eclipse inverter.

David Bruce: G’day – my name is David Bruce from Essential Solar. So, Finn, thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about Aussie made products for the solar industry. Today, I’d like to talk about the Eclipse inverter from MIL-Solar. This inverter was designed and developed by a company called MIL-Systems who are based in Footscray, Victoria.

MIL-Systems’ business has been to design power electronic products for the Australian Defence Force. So, they’re very much used to designing for harsh environments – typically, the Australian environment can be a lot hotter than it is in Europe and especially in China too.

We love it. We believe that there is a long future for this inverter. It’s a very well-designed product. It’s got this fantastic heat sink on the front, which does a couple of things. One is it removes the need for a fan. So, it takes away that noise that we get from fan inverters, giving us a bit of flexibility to install it in a variety of different places, including inside a home.

But the other thing about having such a good heat sink on there is that it allows the internal components to run at a much lower temperature and increase the reliability.

“A Very Reliable Inverter”

I’ve got a great deal of confidence in this company. They know what they’re doing. We’ve been installing this inverter now for about three years. And up until now, we haven’t had a single product failure, which is quite remarkable.

So, here’s an interesting question. Why then doesn’t everybody want to buy this inverter?

The reason for that is because most of the Australian industry doesn’t offer this inverter for sale; and they don’t offer it for sale because it doesn’t have a great marketing push behind it. So, our customers aren’t aware of it and that can be quite difficult. It can be quite difficult going to a customer and explaining to them the benefits of something that they’ve never heard of.

So, much of the industry prefers not to even bother and just to run with these well-known brands that are out there.

At Essential Solar, we prefer to actually go out and offer the customer something that we think is right for them. And so I will give this to our sales team and we will promote that as being Australia-made and not because for any charitable reason. We don’t want to promote MIL-Solar just because they’re made in Australia. We want to promote it because it’s a very reliable inverter. It’s got fantastic support. They’re here for the long term and the specifications and the performance is just perfect for Australia.

So, when MIL-Solar began the development of this product, they wanted to aim at the high end. They aimed at the specifications that you would tend to see from a European inverter – Fronius and SMA – and the price reflects that as well. It’s around about the same price as those European inverters.

It’s a single-phase inverter, it’s got higher input voltage range so it gives us flexibility for design, which is fantastic. They’ve set up their manufacturing in Footscray, and they’ve done that deliberately so that they can support the Australian market; not just this year, not just for the next few years, but to do this for the long term. And I think that’s a very exciting thing and a very important thing for the solar industry in this country.

— Transcript ends.

This segment was from SolarQuotes TV Episode 11: The Australian-Made Solar Edition – showcasing Australian researchers and manufacturers transforming the global renewable energy scene with their technologies.

You can find specifications and estimated pricing for the MIL-Solar Eclipse and many other inverters on SolarQuotes’ solar inverter comparison table.

Related: Read Ronald’s in-depth review of MIL-Solar here and pick up some tips on choosing the best solar inverter for your situation.