My Enermax EG495P-VE Noisetaker 485W PSU broke down after a year. I dropped it off with Enermax's warranty service provider, Comtronic, in BC, Canada on April 11 2007. They took the PSU and gave me an "RMA request form". The rep wrote down a note on the form saying "takes about 6-8 weeks" and said I would receive a call. It has been over 11 weeks now and I have not yet heard from Comtronic or Enermax.

By the way, I've bought 3 Enermax PSUs over the years I think and each had broken down within a year or two.

Time to stop buying enermax I had an enermax psu that managed to last about 3 years. it was still very functional when i sold it. however, their recent offerings don't impress me very much. sorry to hear about your bad experience, i'd go seasonic next time.

Pretty unacceptable. Give the involves parties a call and complain. IMHO RMAs are a joke in this country. A company can choose not to care about its Canadian ustomers by having them ship to an RMA office in California at their expense. The gov't should step in and force either an office in canada or freight pre-payed to the US. My 2c.

It's not Enermax's fault (other than giving the contract to Comtronic). Comtronic is the regional distributor for all of Canada.

Your best choice is to contact Enermax USA by toll free and voice your displeasure with the quality, then with the shady service by Comtronic. They can to some extent influence Comtronic to remedy this problem. Dont bother with email..

That was how Enermax USA, my retailer, and myself forced Comtronic to honour a valid RMA a few years back. It was a most frustrating experience for all parties involved.

Enermax is a good company, just that they picked a rather poor distributor for Canada.

Since Enermax is actively relaying warranty concerns to Comtronic when you contact them, issues with warranty will necessarily reflect back on Enermax. If a company really cared about its customers, they would not force them to take many tedious steps to get the service they deserved in the first place.

From what I've read, Comtronic seems to take care of RMAs only if you can deal directly with the headquarter in Ontario but anyone living in Western Canada may receive extremely questionable services.

[I've just heard from the company and will see how it goes soon]

I emailed Enermax about the situation and received a typically curt suggestion to contact Comtronic. I faxed two notices to Comtronic, the Ontario central office and the local BC office, regarding my displeasure over the delay and my willingness to discuss with those willing to listen. The next morning I received a call from the local branch telling me that my replacement has been ready for pick up but that they could not reach me over the phone (the lack of messages on my answering machine and their name not showing up on my caller display notwithstanding). They also said they didn't have my address (I remember filling out a long RMA form). They said the unit was ready "now" but will be ready to be picked up the "next day", which was really the next week due to the weekend.

In the end, I did pick up a replacement. I can't say I found the service too professional or courteous. There certainly is a lot of room for improvement.

There are sometimes tax reasons that these companies operate across borders in this fashion. If they handled your stuff direct from their US warehouse they could become responsible for paying duties, or preparing a lot of customs documents, preparing RoHS compliance documents, or filing for business paperwork they're not equipped for. There's lots of red tape that could be involved, and we don't know the details. That's why they sometimes pick a distributor inside your country who handles all the problems, and does the paperwork in bulk to bring stock across the borders and such.

This also means even though Enermax may want to fix your problem, they probably can do little directly except exert pressure on the regional people to take care of you.

Could someone please tell me how to get in contact with Comtronic (internet or by phone)? I looked it up and found this: comtronic.ca but I'm not sure if that is the Canadian Enermax distributor.