How SolarTech Saves You Money

When you deploy a piece of equipment, wouldn’t it be reassuring to know that the equipment will operate continuously, without maintenance until the job is over?

The reality is that it takes a lot of careful engineering to accomplish the task of continuous operation. Even though the sunlight is free, it’s not available 100% of the time, or even 50% of the time. Still, the equipment must maintain power 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s no easy task and we can’t blame other manufacturers for not getting it right.

Recently, at a trade show, a man came to our booth and said to one of our representatives “I don’t like these solar-powered signs”. The SolarTech rep, a bit taken aback, asked the man what he didn’t like about them. After a few minutes of conversation the SolarTech rep realized the man wasn’t talking about SolarTech signs specifically, he was referring to solar-powered signs in general and revealed that his experience had been with a competitor’s equipment, not with ours.

As the two men talked a crowd began to gather to listen to the conversation. At one point someone in the crowd asked “how long will this equipment run during a bad snowstorm?” pointing to the display.

“Well”, said the rep, “you could actually throw a blanket over the solar panels and this particular unit would run continuously for about thirty days with no power at all”. Both the man and the rest of the crowd were all obviously surprised to hear this. Another crowd member then offered “mine only last a few days maximum then I have to send someone out to charge the batteries”.

“Are they SolarTech signs” asked the rep.

“No, we have units from a few different manufacturers, but no SolarTech equipment” the man replied.

The crowd grew even larger as the conversation went on. The SolarTech rep then asked the man to estimate how many hours per month were spent by maintenance crews to repair or maintain their existing signs. “About 20” the man responded. After some quick calculating of man-hours plus miles traveled multiplied by gas prices plus the number of units he had in the field, it was found that the man was spending about $750 per month to maintain his equipment because none of it was either engineered or built for continuous operation.

The SolarTech rep then asked the crowd “so can you see why a little more up front can save you a lot more during the life of the equipment?”

From the back a voice called out “it’s a no-brainer!”.

We agree.

From the solar panels, to the patented energy-management system and deep-cycle batteries to the low-power, high-output Mega-Flux LEDs, SolarTech equipment is engineered as an integrated system. When competitors choose to use generic, off-the-shelf components, a tremendous amount of energy is wasted through inefficient electronics which could otherwise be used to power the equipment. The result is greater down-time and more resources spent on maintenance.

And as we all know… time is money