LED Replacement Panels - Energy Saving Govt. Green Scheme - Failing well inside expected Life

I have a small office in Melbourne and we got all the Neon Tube Panels replaced under the Victorian Government’s Green scheme with LED Panels, and we got a rebate for this process.

Just over 3 years later, we have greater than 10% failure rate. 8 out of 67. They are meant to last 10 years.

We have been trying to get the failed LED Panels replaced since August 2022, warranty ran out in December 2022.

The company who supplied them is now saying they are out of warranty, and claim they didn’t get any notification from us last year. We have emails, SMS messages from them and also, appointment messages from them where they failed to turn up to replace or assess the failures.

What can we do, besides buying new panels ourselves, the greater cost being an electrician to install them of course.

Has anyone had similar issues with “Green Schemes”?

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Contact the Victoria Government. If the company doesn’t step up to their obligations they can be delisted as a supplier. Considering how many companies want to sell ‘free’ it must be profitable for them to participate.

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Gosh, thanks … a Code of Conduct, that’s revealing about this industry segment isn’t it! I’ll look into that straight away.

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Also keep in mind the Australian Consumer Law applies, not just their warranty.

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It wouldn’t surprise me if they are meant to last up to 10 years. So you had better check the fine print.

Certainly all of my LED globes only say “up to”, which is a completely meaningless claim. Also one of them also specifies the environmental temperature, presumably implying that under e.g. hotter than standard conditions, the life time would be shorter. These are just regular LED globes though.

Regardless, if you are satisfied that you can prove that you contacted them about panel failure before the warranty ran out then you should read them the riot act.

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Anecdotally, it seems to me that any “ green” scheme, that is government funded, is run by dodgy operators. I don’t let any of them in the house, don’t get involved with them. Just look what happened with the Pink Batts fiasco.

This isn’t unique to “green” schemes. I would like to suggest that any government scheme involving the handing out of taxpayer money can have two effects:

  • It increases demand while not necessarily doing anything about supply.
  • Due to the lack of supply, the market will adjust to draw in a certain number of suppliers who are either outright fraudsters or who are supplying a poor quality product.

Examples that are unrelated to “green” schemes: child care, Medicare.