[KANahas]

From a link in the article:

> The contracts we sign with all dealers clearly stipulate that products that are not UL certified and listed by local power grid companies may not be sold or used in the United States, because the products do not meet US UL standards. If used in violation of this policy, the devices may pose significant-safety risks. To address this, Deye has built a verification mechanism into the devices. The pop-up alert is automatically triggered by the device’s authorization verification mechanism, rather than by any human intervention.

[myself248]

Yeah, which is garbage. UL is a certification body, not a legal requirement. Your insurance might want it, your utility might want it.

But there's plenty of ways to use solar inverters where neither of those factors applies.

And furthermore, you can buy tons of non-UL-certified junk at Harbor Freight and plug it in yourself. It's not like there's a magic forcefield at the border that these Deye units somehow slipped through. Using that as an explanation for disabling their hardware is so insubstantial as to be just this side of an outright lie.

And I'm astonished that the linked article isn't calling them out on it.

[mpnex]

UL is a certification body, yes.

When the local building code requires that grid-connected devices are UL listed, then it becomes a legal requirement. I suspect this is probably the case in most jurisdictions across the US.

edit: NEC section 110.2 indicates all equipment must be "approved" and delegates this to the Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ) locally; and the majority of them are going to defer to a "NRTL" (Nominally Recognized Testing Laboratory, such as UL, CSA, ETL, etc) instead of doing all the expensive and tedious testing themselves. So when it comes to grid connections, some sort of approval is nearly always a de facto legal requirement.