I have been to court more times than is good for my health.
First thing to do is establish the wait before you can get a case to court. It seems to be a year minimum at the moment.
Getting the sympathy of the court is vital to the outcome and indeed the extent to which your claim will be upheld. A partial win is not really a win. To do this you have to make yourself out as very reasonable and the other party as the opposite of this. Just the issuing of proceedings is often enough to get them to deal with the issues, but you need to be seen as reasonable prior to this point. The courts do not like to be seen as a form of leverage, so you need to make it look like a last resort
Over 50% of my cases have involved the defendant not turning up. (They know they will lose so why bother?). In this eventuality the case will automatcally win and the judge will be most likely be inclined to grant your claim in full. He/she will want to move onto the next case asap.
Taking people to court is not a route I recommend, but sometimes there is no other option. If the defendant goes out of business in the run up to court, no redress is available.
Thanks.
Yep whilst I haven't actually done much in regards court directly I am pretty familiar with the ins and outs. I was an FD previously and we had a lot of court cases to get money out of the building trade.
Plus I have a mate who is a solicitor so whilst I try to avoid bothering him too much if if gets that far I will get some advice from him.
I do run things like final drafts of letters past him since I prefer to keep them in laymans terms and not obvious solicitors letters, but just to ensure I have not missed something that could be an issue later.
My situation today is as such :
- I fully discharged the batteries last night so that they sat at 10% this morning when they hit the go charge window.
- They charged with a very slightly different profile to normal, probably as a result of the updates applied, going at full charge rate (5.5kw) for slightly longer and giving a much reduced tail for the final couple of %.
- The supplier already emailed to say they could see the same issue around 9kWh input only where as it needs to be around 11.2-11.3 to fully charge bearing in mind likely conversion loss. (they quote 5% round trip and it seems to be about 97.25% effective on the charge cycle with around 5350w being added to the battery with grid draw of 5500w)
- The supplier has requested support from the manufacturer. This is progress since they have not really at any point previously agreed it was a problem. By default I would argue at this point they now have.
I have said to them to wait out this week to see if we get support from Solax so they can hold on the complaint for now and we can catchup after the bank hold if support is not forthcoming.
I am willing to give them a week or so, but somewhere mid/late next week I would start to escalate again. My contract was with them and they need to provide a functioning system, whilst it sucks for them they need to put me in the position of having a working system.
I am going to tell them I expect this to be by the end of May now they recognise that its not working and arguably no evidence can support it ever has. I am concious of the 6 months here. Install was end of Nov so right now they would need ot prove it worked and I don't think they could.
I am not planning further ahead really at this point but expect its going to need some more specialist support and I am not sure if the installers can do that directly.
As such their choices are going to be pressure the manufacturer solax to get me a solution semi quickly or replace the equipment to make me happy and take up their issues with Solax later.
I am trying to be reasonable and think my repeated questions, and attempts to liase on a resolution would evidence that. Even my emails initally asking for the complains prceedure but then saying stand down on that as your are working to fix it are kind of part of the plan to show I am being highly reaonsable.
I am not super worried about them going out of business they are a fairly large family owned company who have been trading for many years, do other stuff as well as solar and would probably not benefit from going under in order to avoid issues with one install.
I would still have the manufacturers warranty anyway, and they I would be far more likely to escalate the procedure and sue them should that be required.
uk.ecoflow.com
uk.ecoflow.com
