Ever wondered what the "tier 1" meant regarding roof top solar?

[T1 Terry]

The term tier 1 would leave most believing that this is an assurance of quality, reliability and output/performance meeting the specified ranges the panel is advertised to achieve.
I had to investigate the suitability of some s/h rooftop grid feed panels a customer was about to purchase on the other evilbay type site. After running into dead ends regarding feed back about this manufacturer, I tried to find out if they had ever been listed as tier 1 panels ...... that one is an eye opener as to what manufacturers are at the top of the tier 1 listing. Certainly not the Rolls Royce of solar panel manufacturers by a long shot, probably the ones with the most failure complaints against their name if truth be known.

More tunnelling and it turns out it is a credit agency that gives this Tier 1 status and it relates to big solar farms where a bank has financed the project and need to know the supplier won't go belly up if there is a claim. With these mega solar farm projects, they don't get their panels from these mobs advertising on TV, they actually send engineers and techno people to the factory and supervise the testing and quality control aspects of all the panels in their shipment.
This has no bearing at all on the quality of the panels these solar installers with their 6.6kW of tier 1 panels except for the manufacturers name being the same. There is every chance they are the panels "John West" rejected.
Now we come to the Tier 2 and Tier 3 panels, there is no such listing, so any reference to a certain panel being tier 2 or tier 3 should set off alarm bells that these people are telling grade A porkie pies.

Apparently Choice did a test on solar panels but I haven't tunnelled down to see just what they were testing for and how they set their criteria for marking from good to bad, including if they still worked 10 yrs after being installed.

As far as the Clean Energy Council, still going through the auditions to see if I can join the circus. You can't see behind the scenes until you are a qualifying member and they have milked the $680 something plus the $$ for all the other training courses that probably have zero reference to what we actually do ...... they couldn't tell me what reference the "working at heights" had to do with working on the roof of a motorhome or caravan or on a ground level solar array on an off grid set up that I need this "Green Energy Council" certification to do ..... however it does appear that I'm over qualified to do the electrical and battery part because they have no jurisdiction over any off grid systems, only grid tie systems. As far as what they know or the training authorities know about grid tie batteries ..... they are barely coming to grips with lead acid batteries, the mention of lithium gets the Holy Cross symbol to protect them from the evil I spoke ......

T1 Terry

[bagmaker]

so we are all duped again
Bars tards!
May as well stick to the LG Neons. Not that I do, elcheapo cause the Neons are too high in the voltage department.

Anyone know what happens if I put 36v into a 12v lith pack instead of 18v?

[native pepper]

Watched a youtube on solar panel qualities, carried out by a USA solar installing company and they found the cheap panels did as well and in some cases much better than the expensive brand names, some exceeded output by 1/3 of the expensive brands. They were so shocked the stopped recommending and using the brand they had been using as it failed miserably in output and customers were complaining.

I have panels from 1980, which are still working on my workshop and my house panels are well over 10 years old, some are getting close to 20 years and all seem to be providing pretty close to their rated parameters. The bus has panels which are all over 10 years old and soon they will have new ones as increasing the bus capacity. Been saying this for over a year, but the band, farm and now remodeling and renovating the bathroom, the bus has to wait until after xmas to get it's jobs done and as we have gone 4 piece, have to re-organise the sleeping arrangements, bathroom and toilet to ft everyone in.

It's the same with poly and mono panels, years ago mono out performed poly by 25%, now they are almost the same and in some cases, poly outperforms the same capacity mono.

Read they are claiming they have now designed a way to charge lithium cells in your car, in 10 minutes and then travel many hundred of klms. There's also the bloke on the UK who has solved, patented and is about to be put in production aluminium/ air energy storage system problems, using a benign catalyst that's safe and recyclable. These things supposedly will supply enough energy to drive your car for thousands of klms, all you do is swap over the tank and off you go.

I'd like to get my hands on some of the panels they use on space craft and the rovers on mars, which one has been going for a decade now and still performing well. Read they were over 60% sufficient, compared to ours 19-21% sufficient in conversion.

[BruceS]

That may be just because there is no atmosphere, stratosphere or (God forbid) Ozone layer to 'lose' some juice?

[T1 Terry]

so we are all duped again
Bars tards!
May as well stick to the LG Neons. Not that I do, elcheapo cause the Neons are too high in the voltage department.

Anyone know what happens if I put 36v into a 12v lith pack instead of 18v?

The regulator looks after the voltage, the catch with using a 36v panel on a PWM controller for a 12v battery is you will only get half of the current (amps) output from the same capacity panel with an 18v Vmp. 300w @ 18v = 16.6 amps, 300w @ 36v = 8.3 amps.
If you have the panels running through an MPPT controller then that loss does not apply, but all the panels must be the same or you will not get the amps you were expecting.

T1 Terry

[T1 Terry]

I have some of the panel modules similar to those used for the space solar arrays here, Bob (Bob N Bev) sent them to me to check them out. To use them here we would need to pump refrigerated water through a heat exchanger backing plate, but the cold experienced floating above the planet or on Mars would soon dissipate the heat or it might even be used to keep things warm when required. When you aren't paying the bills, fitting as many of these little modules as you can on a solar array where heat is not an issue means you can generate a lot of solar electricity.
These small panels were used in the concentrated solar arrays where they also ran a wet back heat exchanger to heat the water for where ever they were used. The real problem would have been using the heat from the water so it could be recirculated, it would need something like a secondary process that could use the heat to create some other form of electricity generation to be cost effective but I believe the working temperature of these modules couldn't handle the heat required to make steam at atmospheric pressure, so super heated steam would have been out of the question ... so not a steam turbine as such. Perhaps backed up with geothermal steam or solar concentration heat might have worked, but solar is so cheap now it just wouldn't be worth the added complexity.

T1 Terry

[bagmaker]

Anyone know what happens if I put 36v into a 12v lith pack instead of 18v?
[/quote]

The regulator looks after the voltage, the catch with using a 36v panel on a PWM controller for a 12v battery is you will only get half of the current (amps) output from the same capacity panel with an 18v Vmp. 300w @ 18v = 16.6 amps, 300w @ 36v = 8.3 amps.
If you have the panels running through an MPPT controller then that loss does not apply, but all the panels must be the same or you will not get the amps you were expecting.

T1 Terry
[/quote]

About 1 beer after posting that I though "Duh"
Sticking with the thick wires