Dirt Cheap Used Solar Panels: 250W for $50 + Shipping

so these solar panels are super cheap for 50 each one produces 250 watts we have 16 of them so the price was 800 and we get 4 kilowatts and for the price i don't think you can find anything better if you can prove me wrong in the comments section below i challenge you to do so [Music] and today we're going to replace my old array these bi-facials gave me on average 11 percent more than my monocrystallines from rich solar in the future we're going to try different mounting options for these bifacial solar panels so we can increase the output these can be really good if you lift them off the ground and they have adequate cooling so let's remove this array and then throw in these budget panels these panels weigh nothing compared to by facial solar panels these are like half the weight i swear what's nice about cheap panels is i don't care how close they are to the ground and the degradation because they are so ridiculously cheap that i don't care so first array has six solar panels in series but we need to add two more i have 16 panels on that pellet but we have two more panels from previously so we'll actually have 4 500 watts now almost done man i'm tired this is a lot of panels 4500 water ray built in less than one hour and the bricks angled the panels at seven degrees and at my latitude that's plenty for summertime i should get five to six sunlight hours for this array we have three strings two are in parallel and then the third goes to the second input on the lv6548 that unit can handle 8000 watts and we're only pushing 4500 watts into it and voltage open circuit for each string is 200 volts which means these conductors are extremely oversized we will have very minimal losses last week i added another solar input for the third array and we can actually have a fourth array and we have a fifth array on top of the roof so yeah five strings for this system but it's still early morning so the output is pretty low so i'm going to come back in a few hours and we're going to see what it maxes out at but this is a good time to see if any of these panels are shading other ones and so far we have some really good clearance between these but i see a dirty panel right in the middle so i'm going to wipe that down before we actually test everything now the sun is directly overhead and we hit peak irradiance on one of my grid tie systems so let's see how much this thing's actually producing we have 2.24 that was the max i just saw so let's call it 2.2 2.23 this is the output of the first two strings and string number two i just saw it do 1.1 1.12 so for all three strings we're pulling 3 320 watts which is 73 of their rated output so 2 less than a brand new mono crystalline at least the ones that we tested last week so it's not as good as the bifacials but man for the price this is some serious power but the real question is how much it can produce over the course of a day so i'm going to log that data over the next week and see what the average is also i just got a new dc clamp meter this is not sponsored but this thing can measure in rush current and it can measure up to a thousand amps it was super cheap so i'll have a link below we're gonna make a video on this too but let's use it to see what the current is from each string so first string is 9.7 amps second string is 8.5 8.7 amps 8.8 amps third string is 9.1 amps that's pretty good you guys and this row of panels had some really dirty ones i actually used a white washcloth and it turned it black so i probably need to wash this one a bit more and after washing them if i can hit 80 percent of their stc on a hot day that would be incredible so let's estimate how much this could produce so theoretically we should be able to pull twenty four thousand seven hundred and fifty watt hours a day which can propel my tesla model three ninety nine miles so with an array that's less than a thousand dollars in all in one system that's fourteen hundred dollars and a pretty expensive battery you can actually charge a tesla or you could use this much power to run an air conditioner for like a one thousand or two thousand square foot home depending on how hot it is obviously the big downside of the system is it doesn't have a split phase output i might need to add a second one and put a bigger breaker box because i want to power larger loads these batteries just charge up so quickly now i can charge this 14 kilowatt hour battery bank in less than one day so i'm going to have this air conditioner running 24 hours a day to keep the battery discharged so i can actually track how much this array is producing because yeah this is a lot of power now and honestly i might throw those bifacials in front of there and i have another outback controller right here and then see how much we can produce then with those bi-facials i could do 35 kilowatt hours every single day which is a ridiculous amount of power i should also add that the size of this array is massive compared to the bifacial solar panels it's about twice the size but it's less than half the cost also the price does not include shipping but you buy it by the pallet so try to fill up that pallet so you can get the cheapest shipping price possible if you have a full pallet it's very cheap shipping but if you try to buy one then that would just be silly also if you didn't know these are used panels so they are tested for their output i'm not sure what happened from the other santan panels the jinko panels they sent me the variation in output was absolutely awful but with these the current from each series string and the voltage open circuit across each one matches unlike the jinkos that they sent me out previously also on my previous video you can see a lot of people commenting saying that they have the same results with these exact panels so i'm not sure with the other santan panels if they're good or not but these ones are good i haven't seen a single person complain about these so far and considering i connected 18 of them and they all matched up pretty nicely that's really good anyways super cool panels they'll have a ton of these for years so i don't think you guys have to worry about these going out of stock but yeah pretty nice we built this array for nothing in less than an hour also consider the cost savings of putting these on the ground i know it's not recommended but think about how good the output is for the price you can just string these on the ground any day of the week it takes literally minutes if you wanted this many panels on a house you would spend about sixteen thousand dollars plus the interest on a twenty year loan but instead you could just throw these on the ground and power your electric car or your air conditioner your electricity bill could be reduced and you don't need to have a permit to have these on the ground i looked up the city ordinances and no one proved me wrong in the last video and it's an off-grid system so you could just wire up an air conditioner and disconnect it from the grid or you could have an automatic transfer switch for solar system so that when the battery voltage gets too low it switches back over to grid to power your air conditioner at night depending on how many batteries you have but anyways that's pretty much it for this video super cheap solar rate and yeah pretty impressive results i will talk to you guys later bye

Channel: DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse

Views: 1,093,223

Rating: 4.9147758 out of 5

Keywords: will prowse, diy solar, santan solar, $50 solar panel, cheap solar panels

Id: 0yDVXJmsowU

Length: 7min 38sec (458 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021