I've been to Photocomm, pleased with what I saw.
I visited them in Scottsdale on Aug. 29. Theyre located in what you
might call an industrua.ial strip mall, area of small light manufacturing
and warehouse activity. Unpretentious building, offices and work
areas. No sex-pot secretaries, just regular folk working. My first
impression was of smallness, its easy to forget that 20 Mil in sales
is pretty tiny, I think their physical plant / manufacturing stuff could
be put in place for 2 or 3 million $. I'm getting old, the plant seemed
to be filled mostly with 20 something kids, I'm guessing I saw maybe
40 to 50 people at the facility.
I was there as a customer and I didnt visit with management at all.
I've been assisting a science group in Chile innthe purchase of a
$50K Cell-pak shelter and power system and was concerned with
the quality of product they would receive.
I've built two similiar in the past couple years and this one from
Photocomm is MUCH nicer than mine, a very clean finished product.
The unit is about 3 weeks later than promised with the explanation
that the container supplier was late. Maybe PCOM didnt monitor
the supplier but they worked hard, fast, and competently to finish
the Cell-pak in a hurry once the container arrived. I was accompanied
by a guy from Chile, the actual customer: He was very pleased
with the Cellpak and happy with his decision to buy from PCOM. He
was also pleased that PCOM had a catalog in Spanish, took a copy
to show around back home in Chile. My only possible criticism of
the product is that it wont be burned in for a week or two prior to
shipping, but my own experience to date with solar stuff has been
that if it works when first wired its still working a year (or five) from
now.
We spent most of the time with Dave Larche, kind of a project
engineer / supervisor / electrical foreman / trouble shooter /
field support person. Been there 12 years, obviously very important
guy to PCOM production. I hope he's well paid. They don't have
much redundant staffing, loosing a guy like him would be a real
blow.
They dont seem to make large solar modules (50 to 100 watt) at
all, buy those from Solec and other suppliers. Dave though the
modules on our Cellpak were from Sharp, though they were
labeled PCOM. Their quality appeared good, not quite as good
as a Siemens/Arco PC4 panel, but certainly adequate.
Their warehouse had a reasonable stock of Trace inverters,
modules, batteries. People in the shop were assembling lots of
small (1 to 5 watt) solar panels, soldering wires to cells, low
tech stuff and fairly labor intensive. Quite a few of what I guess
are $6 or $7 / hour assemblers. Everybody seemed to be working,
fairly pleasant, friendly work environment as far as I could see.
There had the proper equipment and test chambers for test and
quality assurance work. Housekeeping was good but certainly
not a ":clean room" setting, OK for what they do.
Their outside work is done in a rather small yard, maybe 40 X 100 ft,
OK for now, certainly not enough room to do 50 or 75 M per year.
I think something was said about buying the building next door.
Anyhow I liiked the people I met and our Cell pak is a very nice
piece of work. I didnt see anything that really bothered me. This
is a serious attempt at making money in the PV business and
their focus certainly seems to be on gaining market share. But
little stocks cant sell at 40 to 50 times earnings forever. Lets see
what the bottom line looks like in a few weeks.
Gerry P. |
