Are Used Solar Panels Worth The Money? Performance Test Results

hey guys right here welcome to the channel so today we are doing another solar panel test this time we are testing two panels that are pretty much identical in Dimensions they're both monocrystalline panels This one is new this one is used this one was about half the price of the other one so we're going to compare them and see which one produces the more most power after I ordered these solar panels I called them and I asked how old they were I was surprised to find out that these were only 5 years old I'll just show you the stickers between both of the panels the new solar panel is a Canadian solar panel and the used one is a jenko panel from Santan solar so I was looking for a panel to put on my RV so I decided to buy the new panels for my RV because I had limited space up there but after searching on Santan solar website I noticed some panels that are the exact same dimensions more or less and these came up 325 Watts so this video will tell me if I got screwed by buying these new ones maybe I should have just stuck with the used solar panels so the initial testing of these used solar panels has been very good I even ordered a full pallet and I sold them in my local classified I've got a video on that but the money from selling those used solar panels is going to go to a future solar project I have and one of those projects is to put solar on the roof of this shed hopefully eliminate my power bill so I ended up getting another full pallet of these used solar panels if I use the all the money from selling my used solar panels here towards these solar panels these solar panels would have ended up costing me $30 per panel so 30 bucks for a 325 wat solar panel that's pretty awesome but let's go ahead and start the test here are the panels side by side all right here's the Cloudy test it's actually raining out here this morning so I might keep this on here for 2 hours but show you what we got here we got the battery I've got both these inverters hooked up the same battery if I hook them up to separate batteries uh One battery might have like a slightly might be able to accept more of a charge than the other battery so I didn't want any sort of conflict happening with that so they're all charging the same battery this battery can definely handle this and then uh so we'll first H the victron up to the used solar panel we'll do the power Queen up to the new solar panel let this run for a while see how much power we collect throughout that period of time and then we'll switch it and do the same thing just to make sure we're not being uh biased with the charge controllers so that's a test let's hook it up okay I just plugged it in well this with this raain we're not getting any power hard hardly two Watts 3 Watts about 3 Watts hopefully that one the notice once the rain stops and it's just cloudy then a lot more solar comes through so hopefully it will stop and we'll get some more power coming through but this will be a a good General test for cloudy conditions this will measure the amp hours we collect over time and wat hours we're going to measure it in wat hours so the these meters measure both so we'll just let this sit for a couple hours okay so it's stopped raining it's still really dark out here and there's a lot of water on the solar panels before I collect um how much energy they've collected in the last two hours I'm curious to see if how much uh squeegeeing the solar panels will help the solar production so now I'm collecting uh 13 Watts actively and 13 Watts okay looks like squeegee didn't really help that much okay let's see how much power they've generated in these last two hours all right the new panel has generated a total of 21.7 wat hours the used panel the used panel generated a total of 20.8 w hours so pretty close we'll switch the victron over to the new solar panel and the power Queen over to the used solar panel here I am first disconnecting the solar from each charge controller and now I'm taking off the battery terminals from The Meters so the meters are fully cleared if I were to keep that battery connected the meter remembers the previous value and just adds to it so everything should be zeroed out right now I'm first hooking up the used solar panel to the power Queen charge controller here now I'm going to hook the new solar panel up to the victron starting to rain again guys it looks like the sun's just starting to come out so we better stop our Shady test it's been about 2 hours but these clouds just started breaking up but let's see how much power we got definitely more than before okay here is the used solar panel connected to the power Queen see what we got here 142 W hours the new4 wat hours for the new solar panel wow after editing this video looking at my Watts that are coming through on the used solar panel in this next clip coming up you can see that it's over 400 watts out of the 325 watt used solar panel so that's really crazy I have heard of when uh Sun comes through the clouds like it can like Focus the sun more and you can get more generation than you typically would get over 100% but I've never seen that before so maybe the used solar panel is like able to accept that that and the new one isn't I don't know but it's taking in a lot of power for some reason right now it's kind of a weird scenario so it definitely looks like the old used solar panel won this competition the sun is out fully right now but 116 wat hours on the bottom one which is the new solar panel and the used solar panel is 155 W hours wow now that the sun's out it's cranking up the power I'm just going to write that down and disconnect it because we have Sun okay time for the sunny test this is the test I've really been looking forward to got them at pretty much the exact same angle pointed directly at the sun it's 10:30 in the morning here if I wait till the afternoon sometimes I get some Haze so I'm just going to do it right now you can see it's very scientific with my rotor tiller here propping everything up okay we're just going to do the used solar panel first no this is the new solar panel sorry we're Reading 96 Watts really interesting it's going down batter's at 66% I thought it would be doing way better than this looks like what happened was my meter was wrong on my battery it jumped right up to 100% so it went into float charge mode that's why it wasn't accepting very much of a charge we got Sun oh yeah okay I drain this battery down no shading going on I clean the panels off okay plug it [Applause] in sorry about that glare that scratch I'll give it a minute to settle in okay looks like it's settling in at 290 this is the new panel brand new panel 296 switch to the other one all right here's the used panel I'll give it a little bit here so they're pretty much the same I'm going to say they're identical that's looking pretty much identical to me 29 7 got 296 that is crazy [Applause] exactly the same results now look at this I noticed that this has uh these cells there's 120 of these little cells on here if you look at this solar panel there's the exact same number of cells except the edges they're a little sharper than these edges all right so that's it so looks like during the full sun test the new and solo used solar panels were pretty much the same and during the Cloudy test the first cloudy test when it was raining thick clouds the new solar panel hooked up to the power Queen one with 21 W hours the used solar panel hooked up to the victron was 20 W hours but the real interesting test was when we had partial sun coming out of the clouds and that was really interesting cuz when the new solar panel was hooked to the victron I received a total of 114 wat hours and then when the used solar panel was hooked to the power Queen I was getting I got 142 wat hours so the used solar panel totally killed it I'm not quite sure what to contribute that to so the one other thing I could think of is the victron may have been regulating those flu fluctuations more to give more of a pure flat curve of power going into your battery I'd be interested to see what you guys think about that but but anyways I'm going to love my used solar panels I think I don't know why you would buy new solar panels personally perhaps in a scenario where you have a ground array off the and you want to have a bif facial solar panel maybe you should buy new in that scenario and you want a really specific size but I think that Sanden solar also sells used by facial solar panels as well so that may not even be an argument for new solar panels okay guys it is raffle time so if you want to be part of this raffle all you have to do is use any of the affiliate links I have as long as they're not Amazon affiliate links you want to support the companies not Amazon so if you shoot me an email of your order number after you you have used the affiliate link I'll confirm that and I will put your name on one of these balls here and you can win any of these products so we have heated gloves heated jacket a bunch of batteries 200 watt foldable solar panels DC todc converter and more to come or his Amazon is gift card if if you live in Australia but uh so let's go ahead and try it so we actually never got any orders last week I'm sorry to say so no one's buying anything right now but if you want to uh win one of these things we'll have another raffle next week I do videos every week so guys thanks a lot we'll talk talk to you guys later

Channel: DIY Solar Fun with Ray Loveless

Views: 24,612

Keywords: SanTan Solar, San Tan Solar, Used SolarPanels, Refurbished Solar Panels

Id: j2dcpRbZGEI

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2024