Rating:

Be sure to size your system appropriately to minimize voltage drop to your inverter.

Sunforce isnt the cheapest, but still a good price and a nice, solid product with a 25-year warranty.

Note: GET A SOLAR SURVEY – you might not qualify for any tax rebates if you dont get one!

Also do the math yourself. If you live on the 43rd paralell and get 4.4 sun hours per day average, do NOT place these at 43 degrees! Tilt them closer to the SUMMER sun angle. You’ll get more sun in summer and less in winter, but you arent getting much in winter anyways! You’ll get more yearly output (or get a tracker and not do any math)

The technology is getting better; cheaper manufacturing processes and better spectrum band as well as improvements leading to higher efficiencies. If you want better stuff, I dont know how “long” you should wait. It can only get so good, the potput isnt going to duble or anything. Laws of physics

Rating:

—back to the review as it stood originally—

In evaluating solar panels (and systems of many panels) the typical pricepoint is $5.10/watt in high volume production. If you are finding better pricing than that something is wrong.

An example may be inefficient panels that use larger panels, causing massive panel size such that it is 4-8 times larger than this panel with the same output.

Other inefficiencies to watch out for are caused by voltages that are not useful. You could, for example, have a panel that output 500V at 1/10 A for 50W sold for $250 – looks good financially but very few charge controllers go much over 250 volts (and many dont make 250 volts – some are 12 or 48 volt systems). So that panel is not much use

This panel is in the sweet spot – enough power to be useful (80W/3 is a simple approximation for what useful power you can get with a battery all day long – about 25W or so given inefficiences. So theoretically it could support a 25W load 24×7 with an 8 hour day of sun.

The last inefficiencies to watch out for are panels that need heavy sun before they produce any output. Some panels produce usable (1-2 amps) output with just ambient scattered light such as a foggy day, while others give near zero output unless the sunlight strikes them head on. This panel design gives output whenever there is light, which is good. More light is always better, but it could be worse.

So to sum it up – there are no pitfalls here. It passes all the checks for pricing and performance. We load tested a string of 12 of these for a customer to profile their output to help decide if a rotator would help and it showed that very little gain would come from the expense of an automatic rotation system due to the panel’s efficiency at many angles. With 12 panels we produced 1KW for 8 hours with taper up and down on both sides.

Best of all this can be used in series strings for grid tie systems or with battery maintainers