Renogy 100 Watt Solar panel VS Harbor Freight 100 Watt Solar panel

today we're checking out renigi's 100 watt monocrystalline panel against harbor freight's monocrystalline 100 watt panel to see which one really is the better buy for you guys both of these are brand new out of the box that way the test is as equal as possible and we'll go over a few differences along the way and also about how much they cost i picked up the harbor freight panel for 99 which this was with a coupon because normally the price of these have actually gone up and now the everyday price for the 100 watt panel from harbor free is actually 130 the reningy panel has actually come down in price and it's now only 97 dollars on amazon the rng panel comes in at just over 14 pounds and the harbor freight is a little bit heavier coming into just about 16 pounds for this wider panel the reninja's junction box is ip65 rated so it is weatherproof and comes with 14 gauge cables with mc4 connectors as we take a look at the specs on this panel you can see it is about 18.6 volts and this is our operating voltage and our operating current in just over 5 amps and the harbor freight panel is also ip65 rated at the junction box with 14 gauge cables and an sae connector which i will swap out later if you want to look at the specs on this one it's actually not on the back of the panel you have to go into the manual and take a look and it's 18 volts and 5.56 amps so it is a little bit higher on the amp rating now when comparing these two panels you can see the renegy on the left is longer and thinner but also there are some other differences if we take a look we're going to be looking at the cells right here if you take a look right here these little kind of black elongated areas this part here is actually one full cell and they're actually kind of separated by these little silver things which these are the bus bars it carries the current into this bigger bus bar and then feeds it to the wires now if we take a look this has three cells along the bottom and then 11 along the side so that gives us a total of 33 cells on this one panel and now as we take a look at the harbor free panel which is a little bit different you can see this one has a lot smaller cells on it if we take a look down here each one of these black rectangles is that's basically one cell right there and then the other one right above it and then of course the little silver bus bars now this one actually has 68 small cells versus the reninju panel has 33 so is it better to have a lot of small cells or is it better to have fewer cells and just have them bigger this has been a debate for quite a while it seems like in the earlier years it was better to have a lot of small ones but now it seems like it's kind of gone back and forth but here's another look at it and these are the bigger cells of the renigy panel and here's all the smaller cells of the harbor freight so we'll see which one really does better as we pop the cover off the back of the renigi panel you can see the little orange o-ring that's to help keep the back of this area waterproof and as we take a look at our connections we're looking at the wire here this is actually aluminum wire as opposed to copper and they didn't use solder they use crimp joints which they look fine to me but some people prefer solder as we take a look at the bus bars these are actually soldered and they look pretty good in between the diodes as we pop open the harbor freight panel you can see the orange o-ring around the lid to help keep it waterproof and as we take a look here they actually soldered these ones on and they do use a copper wiring which i will show you that later and these solder joints here at the diodes actually look pretty good along with also on the bus bars so let me know in the comments down below which you guys actually think is better because to me i think this harbor freight panel and it's kind of working here looks better than the renergie panel does so as far as the solder joints this actually looks better looks stronger like it'll hold up a lot longer so we're going to go ahead and get our testing going and right here i have the new harbor freight panel and i have its own extension legs on it and that renegy panel is actually going to hang out on that older harbor freight panel that way both of these are in the same angle of the sun and that way the test is pretty equal and also the direction of them are both facing the sun at the same angles the same direction that way the test again can be as equal as possible and just to make sure we're going to get our handy little light finder here to make sure the numbers are relatively close that way when we do our testing they're both getting the same amount of light no matter which way the sun tends to start moving on us in a little bit and you can see the numbers are very close so this shouldn't really have an effect and also the temperature i put both of these out here almost the same time and you can see that they're pretty much close enough only a couple degrees off so that shouldn't change anything because a colder panel will produce more power than a worm or hot panel okay so we're going to start with the open circuit voltage test that means basically nothing's attached to it except for the meter to see if it meets spec and so right now the renegy panel is putting out 20.9 volts and so you can see that with it just sitting here and it's not connected to anything except the voltmeter it's almost rated at spec it's just a little bit off but now we'll do the same test with the harbor freight panel and it's just plugged into the wire back there and this one is actually showing about a full volt more than the renegy panel so and the cable is actually a little bit longer on the harbor freight panel as well by probably at least those 16 to 18 inches so we'll just kind of do this test again real quick just to verify this is the reninju panel again and as it sits out here and gets a little bit hotter we dropped about point one and here's a harbor freight panel again and it's gone down about point two so other than that we'll go ahead and get a couple things out here but one thing i do need to do is switch out these connectors so i'm going to take the renegade panel back in real quick or actually the harbor freight one and i'm going to swap these out to mc4 connectors and i'll even have a video available that way you can look in the description on how to actually swap this out so all we have to do is cut off the tail end of this real quick with a pair of wire cutters and i'm just going to go ahead and lock that off but because some of my other viewers said you should have saved the pigtail which i agree this is good for keeping it for other projects and stuff even though after cutting a few of these and more i got several of these just laying around so they're kind of getting in the way to be honest so we'll just toss it to the side and maybe use it later and like i said earlier the harbor freight does have copper wiring which is also a bonus as opposed to the renegy but here's our mc4 connectors and again there'll be a description down below with a video link on how to do this okay so i have the panels back out here facing the same direction and the same settings as last time now that's a little meter for the renegy panel and then i have another one connected to the harbor freight panel and this will show us all of our information basically live so if you take a look here this is a renergie one giving us about 21 volts and the one right above it is giving us 22 volts and that's the harbor freight panel so currently it's putting out more voltage but we'll see what happens when we actually hook it up to something if it's going to give us more wattage in the end so we're going to go ahead and use this ecoflow power station and this is what we're going to draw the wattage from from the panels and we'll verify the meter with the meter that's on the power station as well just to see how accurate it is okay so our power station is about 13 charged so we're gonna go ahead and plug in the solar panel now all the way i just have to finish pushing this in give that a little press okay now as we take a look at it it's going to take a second to kind of normalize and there we go so we're getting about 84 maybe 85 watts out of it as we take a look at our power meter here we're getting 86 watts at the meter almost 87 and about almost 17 volts as it kind of goes up and down a little bit and about 5.2 5.3 amps as it goes back and forth so it's pretty close to spec on the amperage a little bit low on wattage and voltage but it's still doing okay we'll see how well it does against our harbor freight panel now all right so now we'll plug in the harbor freight panel all the way give that just a couple of seconds to normalize on the delta station we'll kind of see what it looks like as far as our wattage now you can see it's coming up give that a few more seconds look at that already in the 90s so this is already doing better than a renegade panel look at that almost 100 watts out of it let's take a look at the meter here and yeah as you look at that 17 volts right at 100 watts at the moment and even the amperage is doing really good right about 5.7 there so so far this is doing really well it's basically giving us full spec which is kind of not normal for panels really i mean because these also will degrade a little bit but with these connections you also lose a little bit of power versus if i was to plug straight into this i'd probably get you know maybe another two or three watts you know but as we look at that yeah look how well that's doing that's great so yeah right at 100 watts this is awesome to see basically this panel doing this so it just kind of shows you maybe the copper wire and the soldering or maybe more cells really are just better but let me know in the comments what you think down below be sure to smash the like button and subscribe and until then i hope to see you guys next time

Channel: JOHNNY'S WEEKENDS

Views: 894,100

Keywords: solar, solar panels, solar panel, harbor freight, solar energy, solar power, renogy, rv, offgrid, drycamping, powerstation, ecoflow, photovoltaic system

Id: W-fgI6Kyy2I

Length: 8min 24sec (504 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 19 2022