Deye Brand Guidelines: The Ningbo Dehumidifier Maker That Turned to Hybrid Inverters

A Ningbo manufacturer that came to solar late.

Deye is the brand of Ningbo Deye Technology, a manufacturer based in Ningbo, the port city in Zhejiang province on China’s east coast. The company gives its founding year as 2000 and names Zhang Hejun as its chairman; English Wikipedia describes him as the founder of the business. In Chinese the listed company is known by the short name 德业股份.

Deye did not begin with solar power. On its Chinese website the company describes three core lines of business: photovoltaic inverters, energy-storage battery packs, and what it calls environmental appliances, led by dehumidifiers and heating, ventilation and air-conditioning products. It presents itself as a firm that grew from a small enterprise into a diversified technology group, and its own chronology shows the inverter business arriving partway through that story.

According to that chronology, in May 2015 its subsidiary for variable-frequency drive technology was quoted on the NEEQ, China’s over-the-counter share system often called the New Third Board, and in March 2016 the same subsidiary began recruiting specialists and moving into photovoltaic inverters. Its English inverter website dates the inverter company, Ningbo Deye Inverter Technology, to 2007, and says it launched the first generation of its hybrid inverter — a unit that manages solar panels and a battery together — in 2017. pv magazine referred to the maker as NingBo Deye Inverter Technology in its 2023 coverage.

The group listed on the main board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange in April 2021, the company says, and English Wikipedia also records the 2021 Shanghai listing. Since then the company’s chronology has added new sites: a production base at Longshan in Cixi, near Ningbo, in 2022; a research base in Shanghai in 2023; and a base at Haiyan, in Jiaxing, in 2025.

SUN-prefixed inverters, from homes to rooftops.

Deye’s catalogue covers the main types of solar power conversion. Its English website lists string inverters from 1 kW to 136 kW, energy-storage inverters from 3 kW to 80 kW and microinverters from 300 W to 2.2 kW, alongside off-grid inverters, all-in-one home storage systems and modular storage for commercial buildings. The same menu also carries a solar air conditioner and EV chargers, which connect the inverter range back to the company’s appliance business.

Independent trade press has followed the launches. In June 2023 pv magazine reported that Deye had shown a new line of three-phase hybrid inverters, the SUN 29.9–50K series, for commercial and industrial rooftops at the SNEC trade show in Shanghai, in five versions with outputs from 29.9 kW to 50 kW and with up to ten units able to work together for on-grid or off-grid use. In February 2025 the same magazine reported a new single-phase off-grid inverter for homes, with outputs from 3.6 kW to 6 kW and an IP65 enclosure rating, according to the company.

The model names follow a technical code rather than a story. Products are prefixed SUN, followed by power ratings and type codes, as in the SUN-3.6/5/6K off-grid series that pv magazine described. Software ties the range together: the company presents its Deye Cloud app as the centre of what it calls an energy IoT ecosystem, and says its products are sold in more than 140 countries and regions.

For storage, Deye says it develops its own battery products, from stackable home systems to battery cabinets for commercial sites and liquid-cooled containers for utility projects. On its English website the inverter, the battery and the app are presented as one system rather than as separate products.

Deye’s hardware also reaches some markets under other names. In late 2024 the German technology site heise online reported that inverters sold in the United States by the American company Sol-Ark contained hardware and software from Deye.

Design and documentation.

Solar inverter makers sell a box that most owners rarely look at. The inverter usually hangs on a garage or utility-room wall, with the panels it serves out of sight on the roof, so the companies that make them tend to show the whole system: rows of modules on a tiled roof, a slim inverter mounted beside the fuse board, and, more and more often, a stack of battery modules standing next to it.

The screen has become as important as the hardware. Inverter makers commonly pair their hardware with a monitoring app or energy management platform, and their marketing leans on phone screens with daily power curves, battery charge levels and the flow of electricity between roof, home and grid. Growatt and GoodWe both describe software platforms as part of their range, and GoodWe linked its 2022 rebrand and the slogan “Smart Energy Innovator” to that shift.

Factories and trade fairs supply the rest of the imagery. Brand imagery in this field also turns to production lines, test benches and new headquarters buildings, while the industry gathers each year at shows such as Intersolar Europe in Munich and its regional editions, where makers fill large stands with inverters, battery cabinets and charging equipment and launch new product lines.

Two of the makers in this guide, Growatt and GoodWe, were founded in 2010, in Shenzhen and Suzhou, and both have since added home and commercial batteries to their inverters. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Progress every day.

That link drew wide attention in November 2024. On 30 November heise online reported that some inverters in the United States had stopped working and shown an error message. Deye told the site that only a few inverters were affected, all in the US, and that it had not remotely controlled them; the message, it said, came from an automatic authorisation check built into its inverters, because its contracts with distributors bar the sale in the United States of products without UL certification. Deye added that it does not sell inverters in the US. In an update on 3 December, Sol-Ark told heise online that the units in question were Deye-branded inverters sold without authorisation in Puerto Rico and the United States, and said it would offer the affected households a possible solution.

The same report recalled a compliance matter in Germany the previous year, when Deye’s microinverters lacked a protective relay required under the VDE-AR-N 4105 grid-connection standard; Deye supplied an external relay box and had the devices recertified, heise online reported.

The company’s Chinese website credits its chairman with a guiding idea, that there must be progress every day, and the English site gives “make progress every day” as the company’s goal. Its stated vision is to become a well-known brand for residential solar and hybrid inverters.

For a design guide, Deye shows a brand built on a technical naming system and a single app rather than on a founding story. Compare Sungrow, another Chinese inverter maker, and Growatt, a Chinese maker of hybrid inverters. For this guide we use a deep teal and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Deye’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.