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hi welcome back to projects with everyday dave when i built my solar array i tried to do it as efficiently as possible i wanted my payback period to be as short as possible i did all the work myself saved over ten thousand dollars in the process but some of you left comments on my video that it could have been done even cheaper if i’d gone with used solar panels and i thought use solar panels i expect these things to last 25 to 30 years the solar panels that i used are a name brand solar panel mission solar and they have a 25 year warranty do i really want to risk using used solar panels that have no warranty well today we’re going to take a look at that well i did some research on it and i found a reputable company that sells used solar panels and that’s santan solar a friend of mine wants to install a new solar panel system on the roof of his new barn and after researching it i convinced him to go with used solar panels now this is a 385 watt jinko solar panel and it’s ul listed so we’ll be able to use that for his grid tie system i ordered an entire pallet of these jinko panels for his roof system and when we get that installed i’ll bring that video to you at the same time santan solar sent me two 230 watt panels to evaluate now these panels are for off-grid use because they’ve had the original stickers removed they’re a brand name panel but the sticker is no longer on there now both of these panels are really inexpensive the pallet pricing for these jinko panels was 110 and the pallet pricing for these 230 watt santan panels is about 50 and they’re only like 53 dollars if you’re getting them individually but if you’re getting them shipped it makes sense to order as many as possible to spread the shipping cost as far as possible now because my solar system uses solar edge optimizers i can get a couple extra optimizers we’ll take apart the end of the solar array and in today’s video i’m going to install both of these 230 watt panels on my solar array and we’ll collect some actual data and be able to compare it side by side to my brand new panels that i currently have and we’ll be able to see how well these perform once we understand how they perform we’ll be able to understand if this is a good value or not so let’s get them installed doesn’t look too bad there’s a some dirt on the glass which looks like easily comes off let’s check the open circuit voltage here all right that open circuit voltage should be 37 volts 33 volts on a cloudy day looks like it works so these are not ul listed they have the labels removed from them so they’re for an off-grid application but i’m gonna attach this to my solar array since i have solar edge optimizers i can have mismatched panels so i’ll attach this into the array and we’ll get some data from it and see how it’s performing so let’s stick it in all right the sun has just come up over the horizon we’re producing a little over 2000 watts now to safely swap out a panel on the array we want to do a proper shutdown so first of all i’ll flip this switch on the side that shuts off the ac connection and it says on here do not disconnect because it’s at 442 volts and that voltage is slowly dropping once it drops below the safe 50 volt range we can turn off our dc disconnect and be able to safely go out and work on our array since we have solar edge optimizers on each panel they will be set to a safe one volt per panel voltage we’ll be able to swap it out with no problem okay now it’s dropped below 50 volts so we can go ahead and turn off the dc disconnect and now there’s no power and we can go ahead and make our swap okay we shut the system down on the inside and now with my amp meter i can just confirm that there’s no power going through that now i know that it’s safe to go ahead and disconnect it we’ll break this zip tie all right we’ll just take our release tool and disconnect the panel from the optimizer all right now that the panel’s disconnected we can unbolt it and swap it out all right we’ve got it all connected let’s go ahead and turn the inverter back on and we can track the data and see how it’s performing let’s check it out all right we’ve got our panel installed now let’s go ahead and turn the inverter back on we can do the connect the dc and we can see voltage is available and then we can turn the ac power on and it will take a minute to initialize and start up and then we’ll be able to see what the performance is of each individual panel on the computer because we have the optimizers assigned to each one so let’s power it up take a look at the data okay with my solar edge monitoring software we can take a look at each panel individually so this module here is the 230 watt panel in the bottom left corner and we can look at how much power it produces and from this graph on this particular day which is a little cloudy it’s bouncing up and down it looks like our peak wattage was 163 watts now if i compare that to a random other panel from my array we can see that the peak power for that panel was about watts 318 watts is a it’s about 85 percent of its peak performance and 163 watts is 71 of its peak performance so already right there we can see that this panel is not quite producing as much as its rated output would be if we back that out it’s probably closer to performing like a 200 watt panel which would still be really good let’s take a look at the energy here now this plot is how much energy is produced in each hour on average so for the hour leading up to one o’clock this panel produced 154 watt hours so that’s pretty good uh it’s not a very sunny day and it’s in the fall so 154 watt hours in an hour is a pretty good output i can compare that now to the output from my 375 watt panel and it’s putting out 304 watts in an hour 304 watts over an hour is about 81 of its rated output and 154 watts in an hour is about 67 so i’ve looked at these numbers and i’ve i’ve run some calculations i think we can pretty well say that these 230 watt panels are performing like 200 watt panels which is still really good that’s still 25 cents a watt if you’re spending 50 bucks a piece for them it’s way cheaper than what i paid for per watt for my solar panels so i think that’s still a really good deal now here’s a whole day’s worth of production you can see that the other panels are producing in the 1.2 kilowatt hour range and these 230 watt panels are producing a little over half a kilowatt hour so about 50 percent a little over 50 percent of what these other panels are producing so that also puts it in the 190 watt to 200 watt uh performance range it’s still less than half the cost per watt that i paid for my panels i paid 68 cents per watt for my panels and these if you considered them to only be 200 watt panels that would be 25 cents per watt that’s super cheap i threw that jinko panel up on my array let’s uh do a quick switch over there and see how it’s performing so i still have the 230 watt panel down in the bottom corner and then this is the jinko panel up in the top and right away i can see it is outperforming every one of my other panels even my highest performing panels at 724 watt hours so far today and it’s at 752 watt hours now it is rated slightly higher it’s a 385 watt panel but it’s used so i expected it to be performing a little less than my panels i mean these 230 watt panels are performing at a 200 watt pace and it looks like these 385 watt panels are producing even better than my 375 watt panels let’s jump over to actual wattage so pick a spot in the day that shows how the actual power output at this point so let’s pick uh an average panel here at 230 watts divided by 375 that’s 61 percent of its rated output and then this jinko is putting out 262 almost 263 divided by 385 that’s 68 percent it’s putting out it’s putting out closer to its rated value than my brand new mission solar panels that’s fantastic it’s outperforming them in every way i wasted my money on brand new panels i can see that right now well i’ll have to collect more data and see if that pans out to be but preliminary results show really really fantastic performing panels wow i’m blown away by these results i can’t believe i wasted that much money on brand new solar panels when i could have had panels that perform as good or better than mine for less than half the price i wasted three thousand five hundred dollars on putting new solar panels in and here’s the reality these panels are getting replaced somewhere and they would go to the landfill if they weren’t repurposed and they still have plenty of life in them so i can keep them out of the landfill and save money at the same time it’s a win-win here’s the thing with a 25-year warranty you’re planning on keeping these panels for 25 years but the technology is changing really fast so if i spend half as much money as i originally planned 10 years from now if the technology is dramatically different i can spend the other half replace them all with something new and give them to someone else to repurpose this is a fantastic way to go in the beginning of the video i was only planning on reviewing this 230 watt panel but in the meantime i already stuck this on the array and i gave you a sneak peek of its performance and just based on that small amount of data it looks like these panels are far outperforming my panel so for these 230 watt off-grid san tan panels i would plan for them to perform like 200 watt panels at pallet pricing of 50 and a performance of 200 watts that puts them at about 25 cents per watt and these jinko panels are rated 385 watts and they’re putting out at least 385 watts worth of performance at pallet pricing of 110 that makes them 28 29 cents per watt both of them way less than the 68 cents per watt that i paid for my brand new panels santan solar has been really great to work with if you’re not sure which panels will work for your purpose just give them a call they’ll help you out if you do buy solar panels from san tan solar please mention every day dave it helps out my channel and it’s no extra cost to you i’ll also put an affiliate link in the description below that you can utilize if you’re buying online as well as a number of other links and resources that you might find helpful in your project stick around for future videos we’ll be doing a complete roof install on my friends with these jinko panels and i’m really looking forward to showing you how that turns out so i’ll see you next time …