NORTHERN INDUSTRIAL HIGH WATTAGE SOLAR PANELS – 15 WATT

Review by Thomas H. Lawler for Northern Industrial High Wattage Solar Panels – 15 Watt
Rating:
I’m 95% sure this unit and the Sunforce 50032 are the same thing (except for maybe the boxes they’re placed in). The phamplet that came with this on how to wire it up was identicle to one that came with the Sunforce 7 amp controller and shows several other panels including what appears to be the sunforce 50044 kit (I ordered the panels I have from Northern Tool but the controller from Amazon). So everything is hinting they’re all the same thing in different packages. I didn’t actually see any “Sunforce” names or logos on the products, but the boxes were the only thing saying “Northern tools” specifically likewise.

I got 5 of these about 2 years ago and didn’t do any tests at that point (except plug them in and see that my battery voltage did slowly rise). I recently became curious about how much power am I really getting from the panels I got, so I set up a test. On a fully sunny day I placed a panel in direct sunlight, aimed it to get as much power as I could (watching my Fluke meter that was measuring the amps going from the panel to a small battery) and I could only get ~0.3 amps (which is ~4 watts). I thought maybe the battery was near fully charged and not accepting much power, so I plugged in a heater that draws at least 5 amps off of the battery, but that only increased the output of the panel to ~0.4amps (or ~5 watts). I tried another panel to see if it was just that one, but the 2nd one had about the same performance. I don’t know if the lack of output is just because I’m not living in the south or didn’t try that at high noon, but I wouldn’t expect that big a difference (especially when I gave it the benefit by doing my best to aim it to get the best sunlight/power). So if these are really supposed to be able to give you 15 watts of power, I’m left wondering what are the ideal conditions that you need for such (or to at least be getting something close to 1amp output rather than just 0.4 or 40% of it’s label)?

I’ve also since done some math on the cost of solar panels versus the power they give. If you really want to get into solar power, a panel (or set of panels) that can give you 1000 watts (or 1 kiloWatt) costs ~$5000, yet that can save me as little as $0.10 on your power bill per hour of use. So that means it’ll take 50,000 hours of use for them to pay for themselves (which is over 15 years at ~8 hours of full power per day). To get enough power to fully run a house can require you to have panels adding up to 10,000 watts available and get into costs like $50,000+ (especially if you need to store up enough power to last you thru the nights & days that are cloudy where your power is greatly reduced). The panels put out DC power, so to store that power and convert it into household power requires batteries and power inverters as additional costs (in up front and maintenance).

So unless you have a lot of money you’re willing to put into such and realize your return will take more than a few years, solar power doesn’t seem like a great solution for the energy problem.