Have had this flexible solar panel for just a few days so far. This panel has grommets along the edges for easy mounting, I used rubber tarp straps to mount this to a 100 gallon cylindrical fuel tank. It charges the deep cycle battery that runs the pump that was already in place. I used to put the battery on a charger every night the pump was used, with the solar charge is not necessary, is virtually maintenance free now. I bought a square framed panel first, did not take long to figure out this was going to be a nightmare getting a square panel mounted to a round tank. With this flex style do not have to worry about rocks and gravel kicking up on the panel either. This is a perfect solution, looks to be well made, hopefully I will get many years of use out of it too.Here is my blog about the project.
A good buy, with good performance; what more could you ask?
Why not that (coveted) 5th star?
The web-site picture that shows the panel semi-folded is roughly 1 or 2 degrees from the point where you start damaging the printed-on crystalline structure. You are NOT going to roll that thing up to store it, but so far, that has not been an issue on my boat.
Special Kudos to Amazon:
When UPS decided NOT to deliver my package because they thought I had moved (33 years in same location, yeah, right) Amazon not only took back the returned panel, and did NOT charge me any re-stocking fees, they sent me ANOTHER panel with NO shipping charges.
Any company can take care of a customer when things are going well; the mark of a GREAT company is how well they take care of you when things are going very badly.
Thanks, Amazon!I have only had this one for about a month, and it works well to keep the battery on my boat charged. It is lighter and thinner than the others I have bought at the same power level.
While it is flexible, it is not as flexible as the Amazon write up makes it look. Not a big problem, but it affects how you can mount it.
Good value for money.This panel is not capable of producing more than about 15 W under bright sunlight. This is confirmed by the data on the label on the back of the panel, where the short-circuit current is rated at a little over 1 ampere. The panel is also misdescribed in that there are six grommets, not four. If the product specifications were given, I would've bought something else. This is a general problem with product descriptions on Amazon. In most cases over the last few years, the Amazon listings have been very incomplete. I find out more, but not enough, from the customer reviews.I installed two of them (parallel) a year ago on my 36' sailboat on deck right under the boom, so I step on them quite often. It's more than enough for GPS, windex and echolot under rain. The best what I measured from both 3A in sunny day (sun angle was maybe 70 degree) worst just after sunset 0.5 A. Obviously you cannot expect one panel would give you 30W in real life (maybe in the cosmos).
I give 5 stars, but it is not clear 5. Panels are flexible so could be placed on a curved surface, like a deck, but the huge mounting wholes gave me hard time to mount panels nicely.
I payed $140 for each a year ago
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