Best Solar Panels for Off Grid Systems?

well hey folks welcome to solar cabin channel it's spring I know a lot of you are getting excited to get working on your homesteads and getting your off-grid systems put together so I thought now is a really good time for me to maybe do a short lesson on choosing solar panels and there's a lot of different varieties out there there wasn't very many varieties when I first started in solar power almost 15 years ago and some of you may remember this and some of you may still be using some of these panels this is the panels that I started with which are the harbor frieght and they're pretty pretty long panel about a foot wide and about three feet long and these are the Harbor Freight panels and this is what a lot of off-grid are started with and what a lot of off gutters are still using now Harbor Freight panels at that time we're extremely expensive this they started out a little over $300 for a 45 watt set of panels and what they are is it comes with 315 watt panels now I'm going to explain the difference in the types of panels and why you want to be careful in what you're choosing because you're going to find a lot of different types of panels out there monocrystalline poly crystalline amorphous flexible ribbon and some even some other types of panels out there now so you want to be educated to what you're looking at and each panel the the main focus you want to remember is there's a different application there's a different efficiency and there is a different expense all involved in the type of panels that you choose for either your off-grid or on grid applications you want to be educated so you know what those panels do and why you want to choose this panel over that type of panel because salesman will try to sell you any panel and tell you they're all the same you know this is a good panel or this panels better than that panel you want to know why a panel is is recommended for the type of applications you're going to be using I mean I focus mostly on off-grid applications so I'm going to recommend panels and things that will use better for off-grid applications now these types of panels here this these are actually chip panels they don't really fall into any category because what they are at a solar silicon wafer now how silicon wafers are made is they make a full wafer then they chip off the corners of it okay and they they use that full silicon wafer is called a mono santé standing for one mono silicon wafer or silicon ingot okay the silicon ingots are generally very fairly expensive to make they were very expensive when I first started out you couldn't even get a mono crystalline silicon ingot what you would get is these which are called chip panels and what they would do is they would chip off the corners and the sides to make the silicon ingots for a very expensive panels and those panels were used on space missions and things like that there's still some of them up in space that are being used since the 70s okay and they are very efficient silicon ingots and they were also very expensive to make but in order to make them they had to clip off the corners when they was doing their wiring and making their way fur and then the solar companies in China would take the the little teeny pieces and they would put those pieces together and wire them all together to make a solar panel so these are called this is called a chip panel as would be the best description of it it's a whole bunch of small little ends and chips off of a full silicon ingot in order to make a panel now there's nothing wrong with that they do work however that the efficiency isn't very good because it's a bunch of small pieces and they have some drawbacks because the chips are all wired together so it takes a whole lot more wiring in order to make these out of these small chips that go into these panels and it is the wiring not the silicon itself that fails because they have so much wiring involved in here they tend to wear out a lot faster and break down a lot faster and that's what happened with these 45 watt systems and a lot of us ended up with mine only lasted about 10 years sit now that's not bad I the price on these has come down when I when I got them I spent over three hundred dollars for a 45 watt system which was enough to run a couple of lights in my water pump and recharge some gadgets that's about all I needed at the time and I thought it was a great deal boy that you know I that I was in heaven because now I didn't have to keep recharging my truck battery in order to run those appliances now these systems these Harbor Freight systems have come down in price to about $199 and they do include a controller which isn't a very good controller I'll tell you now and it includes a couple of lights it includes your wiring it includes a setup so you can recharge from the USB you could recharge a phone or a laptop or something like that doesn't include a battery but includes that for $199 still a lot of people use these I still have two of these on top of my camper shell on my truck I still use these but out of the six that I got after 10 years only two of the panel's continued to work and I don't know if you can see this but what happens is the wiring that's inside because there's lots of wiring the wiring tends to fail a lot faster the other thing is you'll get the the back burn out will burn out and the the but however the panels are well made they're aluminum frame a safety glass good back come with a long long wire for connecting up so they're still a good what I would say starter system if all you want is just a basic little starter system to get started not a bad deal you can go ahead and get the Harbor Freight panels their efficiency though is not very good these panels will probably only be maybe maybe six percent efficient so they're not converting a lot of energy sunlight to energy now you have to understand how energy is produced in a silicon wafer you've got two wafers what's called a pea wafer and an N wafer which stands for positive and negative they put those together in a sandwich and in back of that is in between that is a bunch of wiring and back of that as a collector plate and what that does is it collects the sunlight and it converts that using the free electrons that are between those two different negative and positive panels and it kicks off the electrons into the wires the wires flow the electrons pull through the wires and that is electricity that's that's all there is to a solar panel it's just two pieces of silicon with a positive and negative charge sandwiched together with a collector on the back that's how a silicon panel works now the difference is when you get a bunch of these little chip panels like this there are a lot less efficient of collecting the sunlight so these are only going to be maybe maybe six percent efficient now I'm going to show you some other panels a poly panel and a model panel that are much more efficient at converting these electrons converting the sunlight into electrons so you get a lot more power out of them for a smaller amount of space but again the Harbor Freight panels a lot of you people still using them out there good kit you can get them on Harbor Freight comm $199 for a I set up 45 watt set up they still work I don't care for the controller but I got one when they first came out and I think they have improved from what I've heard they've improved the controller it's working a lot better now they may have even improved the panel's I don't know but I wouldn't count on more than about 10 years average on the panels for these they do include a couple of 12 volt DC lights that's not bad now the other types of small systems that you can get today I'm recommending these for people that just want to kind of get their feet wet with solar power they're not made for running a whole household or something like that these are just small systems and to explain the difference in the types of panels that you can get out there the other one that I was sent which I use in my bug-out bag this is made by son Jack comes in a nice case now these are what they call flexible solar panels or film they're called film solar panels or flexible solar panels you can see this here it's got four of them I'll try to get you a close-up view there it's got four of these flexible solar panels you'll find these a lot in small appliance chargers and gadgets and things like that now because they they can be cut much smaller it's hard to take a solid ingot of silicon and it would be very expensive to make a small gadget so instead they use this thin film or flexible film solar panels now they are flexible they Bend somewhat you can't just you can't bend them around a complete circle you'd break them okay but they do flexible and they're very thin very thin now the application like I said for these is generally used for recharging small appliances however they do make these up to 100 watts or even larger they are they use a film of solar silicon instead of an ingot and the result is it makes it more flexible however it's a lot less efficient generally efficiency on these let me take a look here I gotta take a look about 7 to 13 percent 7 to 13 percent confer convergence on these panels for converting the light into electricity now that's still not bad okay but you're going to find out Napoleon models are a lot more efficient at converting electricity recent an application that people use these for small gadget recharging like in this case here it has a USB charger I can fold it up stick it underneath my seat if I'm going camping I can plug in my USB I can recharge my phone I can recharge small gadgets and stuff like that the larger panel is up to 100 watts because they are lightweight and because they're flexible a lot of people are using these in applications for camp trailers RVs tear drop campers things like that because you can put them up on your roof and they're not going to add a lot of weight to your trailer so that's another good use and application of these however they're not as efficient and they tend to be more expensive 100 watt panel of flexible solar panel will cost you about a hundred and eighty eight dollars for a hundred watt panel of the solar flexible panels like this but they have a good application where you need lightweight they also handle heat very well because they don't have a back panel they're not a solid silicon wafer they don't absorb heat as much so they won't they will stay cooler but again so far the long range look out look for these panels is not that good you I would still say only about ten years ten years maybe fifteen with a really good high-quality thin film panel and most manufacturers will not install those excuse me will not install those with a warranty however they also take up more space so 100-watt if you have a hundred watt panel of this thin film it's going to take up more space because it's much less efficient so it's going to be a much larger panel but where they're using these alot is it is in industries where they want to keep the cost down and lightweight they're putting them up on a roof and they don't really care about how much space it takes they'll use thin film a lot of times in the lay them out just like a carpet the lay them on top of the building and that's how they use to produce electricity for those applications that would be a good application for it or for an RV or a camp trailer where weight is a concern then you might want to consider a thin film flexible solar panel ok the next panels I'm going to show you are the poly and the mono which is what I recommend for most off-grid applications so let me grab those two panels and I'll show those to you okay folks so this is a 5 watt polycrystalline panel poly means more than one crystal and what they do is they create a slurry of the they take the wafer and they instead of making one solid way for what they do is they make a kind of a slurry of crystalline panels and then they cut that into chunks into square blocks and that's how they make a polycrystalline and if you can see it kind of close you can see that they're all kind of a square that's all cut kind of in the same shape and those are they're not a solid ingot what they are is they're polycrystalline wafers now polycrystalline was about all you could get for a long time this what I had on my cabinet all of my panels were polycrystalline panels for a long time I had 580 watt system now this is just a 5 watt panel I've got panels that are 80 Watts 120 watts 100 watts all in polycrystalline you can get them any sizes I wasn't going to drag a 100 watt panel up here to show you so this is a 5 watt panel I'm going to show you the kit this comes with it's a pretty cool kit now polycrystalline panels y8 a lot of people choose them one thing they're less expensive than monocrystalline average price on a hundred watt panel crystalline panels right around one hundred and nineteen dollars if you look around or if you buy in bulk you can get them as low as sixty cents a watt okay so a six one hundred watt panel you may be able to find for sixty to seventy dollars usually you get those in bulk deals and that's how I recommend you buy your panels anyway if you're going to buy panels instead of buying a single panel at a time by six or eight or ten panels that you're going to use for your place and ask for a bulk deal and you'll get a lot better ideal that way and you can get them down for about 60 or 70 cents a watt if you buy them individually you're going to spend right around a dollar a watt for a polycrystalline panel where a monocrystalline panel which I'll show you I use on my system will run you about 139 dollars for a hundred watts polycrystalline panels are not quite as efficient as mono crystalline because it uses multiple crystalline cells the efficiency goes down somewhat efficiency on these will be somewhere between nine and let me check to make sure I get this correct excuse me polycrystalline panel somewhere between 13 and 16 percent efficient that means it takes about 13 to 16 percent of the light that it sees that it converts into electricity compared that to a monocrystalline panel that will get between 15 and 20 percent and some of the monocrystalline panels are now getting over 20 percent closer to 25 percent efficiency so in order to have a hundred watt polycrystalline panel it takes up a little bit more room so 100 watt polycrystalline panel will be a larger panel than 100 watt mono crystalline panel so if space is a concern of yours on your homestead then a polycrystalline panel is going to take up a little bit more space if space isn't going to be a concern don't worry about it the efficiency makes a big difference though polycrystalline panels at the time we're very good we thought the efficiency was great if we were getting fifteen fourteen fifteen percent efficiency out of a solar panel polycrystalline panel compared to the six percent that we were getting out of our Old Harbor Freight panels that was a big difference you know that's like doubling and you could get one of these panels at that time when they came out I could get a polycrystalline panel for around two hundred dollars for a hundred watts where I spending over three hundred dollars for 45 watts so you can see there's a big difference in price all of a sudden that made polycrystalline panels very popular and a lot of homesteaders still swear by polycrystalline panels because they're less expensive they do a good job now application where I would recommend these polycrystalline panels work better in a very bright sunlight if you live in Florida or California or Australia or someplace it gets very good sunlight all the time save yourself some money and get the polycrystalline panels and they'll do just a fine job of converting because they're getting good sunlight all the time monocrystalline panels do a little bit better in low-light conditions because they have a solid ingot of silicon so polycrystalline also look very nice a lot of people like the color because it has kind of a nice bluish color to it and there you can hook these up they come in either 12 volt or 24 volts panels and I'll explain why that's important operators sometimes will choose between their having a 24 or 12 volt system some people have been have a 48 volt system generally the 24 volt system and the 48 volt system are used for if you're going to be running larger appliances if you're going to be running a fridge you know and other places like that that require a lot of power and a larger inverter then they will hook these in series which means hooking each panel together so the positive wires all run together and then you have one positive wire coming out and just one negative wire coming out and that runs to your controller now with the controller with the Polli panels you would want to use a controller that will convert the power from 24 volts or 48 volts down to 12 volts that requires a little bit more expensive controller I use a 12 volt system for that very reason I don't want to have to spend for an expensive power controller so I use monochrome and I use 12 volt systems however a lot of offgridders are using 24 or 48 volt systems a little bit more expensive controller but the reason they do that is because then they don't have to use as heavy a wire 12 volt wire because it's 12 volt requires a larger gauge of wire in order to travel the amount of distance otherwise you're going to lose a lot of power through the wire as he and you could have burnouts from the wire if you tried to run at very long distances if you bump up the panels in series to either 24 or 48 volts then you can use smaller gauge wire which is less expensive wire is expensive because it's copper in most cases so you can use lower gauge wire and you can also run it longer distances other than that there really isn't any benefit to running 24 or 48 volt or 20 or 12 volt they're all power that it doesn't matter that way you might get a little bit more efficiency out of a 24 or 48 volt system and you'll be able to use longer wire runs now why that's important if you have to put your panels away from your house or your cabin because of shading which I'll talk about you need to put them quite a ways away from the cabin or something like that then you may want to go wire in series so that you can go for 24 or 48 volt use the lower gauge wire and a longer run of wire from your panels to your battery system that's one of the reasons a lot of off bidders using their 24 or 48 volt system my paddles are fairly close to my cabin I use 12 volt system which I'll explain when I go and look at my panels so that's the polycrystalline panels you'll see these at a very affordable price you can get them at a better deal if you buy them in bulk again very good in areas where you get lots of bright sunlight a couple of the drawbacks on these is they don't handle hot weather as well as the monocrystalline if you have a really hot weather problem these will tend to heat up a little bit more than the monocrystalline panels do not much not that much than it makes all that much difference but just something to keep in mind if you're going to be in an area where it gets extremely hot you're living in the desert or something like that you may want to go with the monocrystalline panels because they can handle the heat a little bit better other than that aluminum frame safety glass good connectors on the back most of them come with MCI connectors ready to roll and you can get these like I said a 100 watt panel run you can get I like the Renault G brand which is made in the US and will run you about $119 per 100 watt panel alright so now I'm going to take you out and show you my own system which is a monocrystalline panel but first I want to show you what this kit came with because this is an excellent starter kit I think for people who just want to get your feet or if you need a system for an emergency backup system for your house for recharging the phone and keeping a couple lights on or the cake take camping because I really like this it comes with a five watt panel and it is made by micro solar you can get these on Amazon I'll show you the picture they're made by micro solar comes with the five watt panel comes with a one amp lithium battery storage very long life be lifting battery storage comes with two pendulum lights lights I got did not look like the ones on the box I'm glad they don't because those are kind of ugly the pendulum lights I got are very nice looking pendulum blights alright so it comes with that and it comes with very long cables about sixteen feet of cable and it comes with a wire set up so you USB port so you can recharge your cell phones or whatever which I'll show you down here this is the controller that comes with it and you see it's got a light on that's because I just pulled it off my walls been charging up it comes with it's got a one amp lithium battery in there so you don't have to buy a battery for this system and it it has two plugs down here for plugging in your panel and your lights excuse me plug for plugging in your panel and then it's got a USB port and it comes with a USB connector that has a whole bunch of different cell phone and different appliance connectors gadget connectors so you can recharge your cell phone or whatever probably even a small laptop or one of those iBooks or ebook whatever the hell they are readers you could probably plug one of those in a recharge them comes to this very well made I was very impressed the panel is very well made the controller is very well made very good wiring on it and you get this for $69 on Amazon $69 and that will give you two lights and a way to charge up some gadgets and there's a really good way to get started if you just want to get your feet wet and understand solar panels or if you need an emergency backup system or if you want to put lights in your chicken coop or just for a cabin a couple of lights you know in your place these are excellent little systems by micro solar very well made $69 a good way for you to get your feet wet learning how to use solar panels don't know what I did with that solar panel now anyway just a good way to get your feet wet okay now I'm going to walk you outside I'm going to show you my 400 watt monocrystalline system so you can get an idea of what an actual homestead system is kind of setup and how how what panels we choose and how and how we're using solar panel to run all our stuff that we use in our cabins so let's go on outside now okay folks this is my 400 watt system for 100 watts monocrystalline panels these are made by Renault G and it's raining right now wouldn't you know on a day that I want to do a solar discussion that decides to rain but that's okay because you can see that even in the rain my panels are still producing some power and these are you'll see the difference here these are an actual full silicon wafer that is a full wafer okay each one of those is a wafer which means that they collect and are more efficient than the polycrystalline that has smaller combinations of silicon involved and these also use a higher quality silicon because they are a solid wafer they have to use a higher quality silicon which means they generally last longer a 100 watt mono crystalline panel will set you back about $139 from Renault G cheaper if you buy them in bulk and they are very efficient anywhere from 15 to 20 percent efficiency these are 12 volt panels they can be wired in series to 24 or 48 volt panels I use a 2012 Volkswagen underneath them and then I've got them about a balanced and wired down to my old horse horse post there but that's how now this system runs my entire cabin I've got three AGM v-max tank batteries sealed batteries inside the cabin and these four panels will charge those up usually by about ten o'clock on a sunny day which it is not sunny today but on a sunny day this will recharge system back up to 14 volts by 10 o'clock in the morning it's usually completely recharged and then I use the excess power for running whatever appliances and gadgets I got all right so those are 400 that is a 400 watt system which I use in my cabin so monocrystalline panels again work very well in low sunlight conditions they stay just a little bit cooler than the poly panels and but they are a little bit more expensive like I said you'll pay a hundred and $19 for a 100 watt poly you'll pay $139 for a hundred watt monocrystalline so there's a little bit of difference they are also smaller the mono crystalline or smaller panel because they do use a full silicon wafer they're a smaller panel than the poly panels and weight and size is kind of a difference for me because I used to have my panels up on the roof I took the panels off the roof and I do recommend you get all will go back inside now because it's raining now one of the questions that I get asked a lot is can you use can you mix and match different types of panels because I know a lot of us like me I used to have a lot of one type of panel and then they come out with a different type of panel at a lower price so we get those you can with some exceptions okay if you're running a parallel connection not a serial connection which means each panel is wired separately into a 12-volt system then you can mix and match because that's not a problem your controller will read the power and it it won't affected it in any way if you're running in series which means you're running 12 12 volt into 24 volt or 48 volt system then I don't recommend you mix panels because what's going to happen is your controller will read the lowest amp panel in your series and it will adjust all the what all the other power power down to that amp so you're not benefiting yourself if you have 125 or 200 watt panel in your system but your lowest panel is only 80 watt it's going to drop the amps down to whatever the lowest panelists the other problems that you have with hooking in series is shading if you get any shade on panels that are hooked up in series it can stop the entire panel series from working now that's another drawback of the monocrystalline panels like I use because they have a solid wafer of silicon in there if you get shade on one of those wafers it decreases and completely stops all of the power in and the other silicon wafers from working with polycrystalline panels you don't have near as much of that problem you can get shade on a polycrystalline panel and it won't affect the efficiency near as much it will still all the other crystal ends are separately worried will continue to produce power so that's why a lot of places where if you have a lot of shading problems if you got trees up above or something or you're worried about shading you might want to go with the polycrystalline panels instead of the monocrystalline panels if shading isn't a problem shade is a problem anytime you have solar folks okay you got to get them out from under the shade if that means trimming some limbs or whatever you got to do it but if shading if you think even a small amount of shade may get on your panels occasionally then you might want to go with poly otherwise monocrystalline panels work excellent can be hooked in series can be hooked in parallel either one so I would try to get all of your panels to be at least close in voltage wattage and amps as long as they're fairly close within 10 percent I would say a volt at us they got to be the same voltage but within the same watts and amps especially then you can mix different brands but don't get too much far away from that 10 percent mark or you're going to run into problems because your controller is going to be confused your controller tries to read the power coming through the wire and it's getting this this amp one time then it gets this amp one time gets it it confuses the controller the controller will try to step up or step down you may wear out your controllers or it just won't function as efficiently as you want it to alright that's about it for monocrystalline panels now I'll just give you some basic information all right with all the the man's technology you would think that we would be really far ahead in solar panel but you know nature beat us to it a long time ago this is nature's little subtle solar panel which I just thought I would share with you the leaf leaves work a little bit differently they don't produce electrical energy instead what they do is they use a process of chlorophyll to create chemical energy in which they take the sunlight and they convert it into a chlorophyll process into sugars which then feed the tree okay that's the basic process man has still not come up with a way to match what nature came up with on its own for all green living creatures plants into producing energy creating energy from sunlight now interesting thing about sunlight there's many different spectrums of sunlight sunlight that we don't even see there is the sunlight that we see which is in the violent to red spectrum violet not violent violet to red spectrum those are the colors that you see and why we call them colors because there are different spectrums of light that's coming from the Sun there's also two other spectrums the ultraviolet and the infrared now the interesting thing is the the violet light is what solar panels use to convert electricity because it knocks off the electrons like I showed you on a wafer but the infrared and some of the other spectrums that we don't see very well and solar panels can't collect actually produce more energy 47% of energy from the Sun is actually an infrared and what 46% is in ultraviolet and we are right now working on solar panels that will collect power from those other spectrums so you may get efficiency in some of the newer solar panels that are using layers that will collect different spectrums of light you may get a fishin C up to 50% where we're only at about our best 25% average about 20% we may able to get up 50% or even higher that would be amazing because that's an amazing amount of power that you would be getting from the sunlight but at present we can only use the violet to the red violet spectrum and so we're not as nearly as efficient and that's only about 7% of the light that you get from the Sun is in that spectrum that we actually can use they ultraviolet and infrared anytime you go outside and you feel the Sun warming your skin what you're actually doing is you're feeling infrared energy from the Sun that's not the light there's a difference in spectrums here that's a different spectrum you're fitting the infrared spectrum that is warming up your skin so that's interesting how solar panels have been around for so long the first solar panel was produced in 1959 at Bell Labs I didn't have very good efficiency at all but they've been using solar panels up in space since the 70s that are still operating and have no problems at all so you know solar panel is really we should have been using solar panel for powering everything a long time ago but you know how it is other industries had wanted their finger in the pie and wanted to keep controlling our energy and so they basically kept solar panels and solar technology from coming onto the market and so nobody was invested in developing that now I know a lot of people don't like us competing with the Chinese but I can tell you this the Chinese invested in solar panel and in the development in the technology and if they hadn't we wouldn't have the solar panels that we have nowadays because a lot of what we're doing is building on what they accomplished in making it affordable that's the biggest thing as the Chinese made it affordable for the average person to have solar panels but I still recommend as much as possible that you buy us made solar panels I'm a big fan of the Renault G panels which are made in the US some other brands and her good panels are made by Solar City and there's some other US companies out there I would really recommend if possible by us made solar panels because that's also creating jobs for us people and so that's where we really need to be focusing on all right folks I hope you enjoyed this video I enjoy putting it together and researching the the numbers so that I would have them accurate for you I know you're all interested in getting your solar and off-grid system set up and I'll be making more videos discussing batteries and inverters and appliances and things like that to go with your system because it's a package deal you have to have it all working together it doesn't work very efficiently so those watch for my videos make sure you like my videos subscribe to my channel come by my website simple solar homesteading calm and you know subscribe so that way you'll see my future videos and we'll get will get in depth on some of this stuff I'll explain it in ways that anybody can understand and because it's not all that complicated but there's a bunch of nerds out there that make it really complicated and you have to have a professional and you have to they're just trying to sell you something you can install solar yourself it's not hard at all alright folks have a great day

Channel: solarcabin

Views: 591,349

Rating: 4.8471704 out of 5

Keywords: best solar panels, mono versus poly panels, thin film, flexible siolar panels, how solar panels work, solarcabin, off grid, simple solar homesteading, survival, cabin, monocrstaline, polycrystaline, tiny houses, homesteading

Id: fl4skasaHmM

Length: 33min 40sec (2020 seconds)

Published: Sun May 08 2016