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hey y’all it’s andy from solar reviews here and today i’m going to do our 2021 expert review for panasonic solar panels now a lot’s happened in the last 12 months with panasonic solar panels they’ve actually announced they’re no longer going to make solar panels after 2023 and so obviously that’s something we’ve had to consider for those of you who have been around the solar industry a while or maybe have been looking in for solar for a long time panasonic is one of the bellwether brands you know along with sun power and lg and a few others that you would have heard about and you know over over the years so when we rank a panel we look at a number of factors and we score the brand out of 50 and what we’re aiming to do really is to give you all the information that really we feel like consumer reviews don’t really do a good job of giving you in relation to a brand so it’s all the technical stuff at the back end that consumer reviews can’t see and also we dig into the financials of the company quite a lot but the first category we score under is module quality now panasonic have excellent module quality if you don’t know the history what happened 10 or more years ago is panasonic bought out sanyo’s solar cell manufacturing technology which is uh what’s called hit cells or hit which is heterojunction uh solar cells and what they are is their monocrystalline solar cell which is sandwiched between layers of morphe silicon solar cells now the reason they do that is the amorphous silicon and the monocrystalline silicon they will pick up and create energy out of slightly different wave forms of light and so when you put those two things together overall you get a slightly more efficient cell than if you just have the monocrystalline cell on its own which is what the standard sort of solar panels do so the two companies in the world that really use hit technology the most are panasonic and another company called rec solar which we will also talk about um in a review because they’re also in our top 10 um list of solar panel brands so but in terms of module quality we look at efficiency and temperature coefficient for efficiency panasonic’s best module 21.7 percent uh is a very good module it’s slightly below sun power and lg that are both in the 22s but it’s very very close for efficiency in terms of the temperature coefficient this is where the hit cells have some real advantages the temperature coefficient of the hit panasonic cells and modules is 0.26 which is actually the market leader and it’s perhaps no coincidence that the other market leader on temperature coefficient is rec solar who also use hit cells so basically what that means is as temperature goes up these things don’t derail in power output as quickly as other brands do when the when they when the temperature goes up so i know it sounds strange for those not familiar with solar this concept that solar panels can produce less power when it’s hotter but they like the radiation in sunlight but not the heat so that’s why there’s this derating factor but in term and you want your temperature coefficient to be as low as possible and the panasonic cells and the rex cells are the two market leaders having said that sun power at 0.27 is only 0.01 of a percent or sorry 0.1 of a percent less so it’s very very close with sun power but credit where credit’s due they’re they are slightly better than anything else in terms of temperature coefficient now the big category this year which has changed for panasonic is financial visibility and bankability we score 10 points for that the reason that the we’ve reduced the ranking for financial visibility and strength is for two reasons and it may seem strange off the bat that we’re doing this because everybody’s heard of panasonic they’re listed on the tokyo stock exchange they’re one of the biggest companies in the world i think they have revenues you know in the order of 60 odd billion dollars a year and profits in the billions of dollars us dollars a year so you know very very large company but there’s a couple of issues one is there’s no separate reporting of the financials just for their solar division so we’ve got no idea if panasonic’s solar division actually makes any money or not and given that they announced last year that they’re going to stop manufacturing solar panels we suggest perhaps it doesn’t the second reason that that um financial strength and visibility ranking has dropped to five out of ten this year is because we simply don’t know what’s going to happen post-23 is there even going to be a brand of panasonic solar panels they’ve certainly said they’re not going to manufacture them and the the announcement suggests that you know they’ll look at third-party manufacturers but we don’t know yet who those 30 third-party manufacturers are going to be whether they’re going to be manufacturing cells using the third-party manufacturers technology or whether they’re going to be manufacturing panels that use the panasonic hrt cell so there’s a lot of uncertainty about that and because of that that financial visibility rating has fallen this year usa investment three out of five they don’t manufacture in the u.s they were involved in some plans for a solar panel manufacturing uh plant in upstate new york um with tesla that didn’t end up going ahead um so the usa investment we scored them three out of five again we’re not talking about panasonic as a whole group we’re just talking about the solar division so that you know that probably guides that ranking in terms of value value is the biggest single criteria in our ranking system and in terms of value we scored panasonic 8 out of 15. so it’s not you know they’re not the absolute most expensive panels but they still are significantly more expensive at the wholesale level so the wholesale level you’re probably talking in a range of 70 to 90 90 cents whereas there are some tier one chinese solar panels that you can buy for around that you know 40 to 50 cents a mark so that’s a substantial difference at the wholesale level and that gets reflected in the retail prices you pay for systems that use those panels in terms of dealer network we scored them four out of five they have a very good dealer network because they have been a bellwether of the industry for so long and panasonic are a very good company they don’t put their name to anything unless it is of good quality and that’s the same if you buy a panasonic tv or any anything else panasonic they are a very very high quality electronics manufacturer so um the dylan network is you know has a lot of good local solar companies around the country that have been around a long time many of them also sell other brands they also might sell sun power or lg or trina or longhi or canadian or something like that panels but they do have a good deal of dealer network perhaps not as deep as salg but still significant in terms of warranty we’ve actually scored them five out of five and actually on the warranty front they’re actually the number one company in terms of warranty um there’s two reasons for that there’s solar panel warranties are a bit weird in that there’s two types of warranty they give you on the panel they give you a product warranty which is basically a warranty that the panel won’t fall apart but then separately they give you a power output warranty now in relation to the product warranty the you know the warranty that the panel will you know effectively not fall apart they their warranty is 25 years where the standard of the industry is 10 to 12 years so they have a very long product warranty but one thing i’ve always found weird about solar warranties is that typically the product warranty was 10 years and the power output warranty was 25 years and it’s like well how is the panel going to still produce power if it falls apart so i’ve never really understood why there is the difference um but nonetheless there is one is to do with structural integrity one is to do with electrical output so um panasonic the leader in terms of product warranty at 25 years in terms of power output they’re also a leader so what panasonic guaranteed that even after 25 years your panel will still produce 94 of the rated power that it produced day one when you got it that’s really really high the average in the industry you know even amongst the tier one panels is probably more like 84 to 87 so it is a really really high warranty overall for 2021 panasonic scored 34 out of 50 it puts us in the very good category obviously the the uncertain future about what they’re going to do in terms of manufacturing in the future and their relative value really with the two big things that cost them most of their points other than that a very good panel very good company overall they rank 10th on our list so they made the top 10 but that was down from the top three last year hope that helps you if you’re looking at panasonic or indeed other competing brands if you want to get a online estimate of the cost and savings growing solar on your specific home there’s a free open calculator you can use on our site we’ll link it in the description of the video it’s a great really accurate calculator it takes half a minute or so to run because it actually does a lot of data work in the back end to work out your electricity usage profile and things just from the the dollar value of your bill but it gives you really accurate estimate of cost savings how many panels you need payback period what your bills likely to look like after solar and it’s really really accurate it even takes into account time of use billing where that exists and things like that so jump on there and have a look that’ll sort of allow you to know what the economics will be for your home and then you can decide if you want to go through and get solar quotes from local dealers that’s all for now have a great day see you next time …