ZN shine / 8.33 Gallium - opinions

[SRE]

So - we're looking for a budget black on black mono - these panels are at the budget end of the price range. Are they :

Rubbish don't touch them with a barge pole
Cheap as chips - an ok budget panel
Great value - reasonable for the bottom end of the range.

Apparently they are covered by a Zurich warranty.

 

[solarsavings]

I have installed a few znshine systems and they seemed to be a mid range rather than low end module to me.

 

[JulianC]

Can somebody define how they determine whether or not a panel is mid-range or low-end? Purely on price? Reason I ask is that some of the cheaper stuff I've used has felt higher quality than some of the more expensive stuff I've handled. Yield simulations show there's not a lot in it performance wise. I remember last year, Canadian Solar were being touted as a good mid-range option. This year, their price has come down more than the competition and suddenly they are low-end tat. Are we misguided? Kidding ourselves that price=quality? Sucked in by marketing BS? Or am I just a simpleton and missing the bleedin' obvious (highly likely). And if I am, does it matter? Do more cheap panels fail than expensive ones? Any proof.

Apologies for the thread hi-jack but the more I read around, the more I see personal opinion touted as fact (not on these forums, it has to be said)

 

[SRE]

Yea I'm having a similar dilemma, I want to do the best by our customers but I'm finding that our customers are becoming less interested in where the panels come from and their efficiency (unless of course they have had a salesman round telling them theirs is the best) and more interested in price. I'm not prepared to be squeezed to the point where we work for nothing so I'm keen to review all of the options coming from the wholesalers at the minute to get the best offering for us and the customers.

 

[Energetic]

We've not used them but worth quoting them as a budget option against something like a hyundai 245 black and letting the customer make the decision.

We recently quoted a job, they had a new Range Rover and convertible Merc on the drive, two houses which they knocked through into one and expressed an interest in Sunpower. We quoted the SP300 all blacks and hyundai as a cheaper option, they went for a competitor offering CETC panels that we hadn't heard of at the time and an inverter we hadn't heard of and i can't remember.

We have always been able to sell on the technical stuff but price is now becoming more of a factor.

 

[Worcester]

We have bought high end, cheap as chips and mid range, and we cannot tell any significant differences .... and we've bought and installed them by the conatiner load, so it's not just one job here or there.. What is interesting is early last year we were being slated on a couple of jobs (by others around here, not the customers) for installing what was then a cheap as chips panel, low and behold after a year of marketing, it's now considered mid range !!!

The actual physical manufacture is all very similar, in fact you may even say that some 'premium' panels e.g. Sharp are actually worse made than they were this time last year.

Seeing as all the panels we buy come with the flash tests, the frames seesm well made, the only variance has to be in the cells. And like all silicon based stuff, some will be better than others, and I guess it is the purchase cost of those that is the biggest difference (but I'm just making an educated / semi-informed guess) So we may only see differences 10 years down the road if they have degraded differently.

They biggest difference we've seen on performance is down to designing the strings and matching them to inverters properly (we use PV*Sol) .
So I've just set up a 16 panels 4kW system using 4 different panels and strung it together using solaredge power optimisers (i'ts what we had left over as bin ends of panels)
I think the only tryue answers are going to come from the likes of the photon tests.

And like you SRE, my customers are more interested in the best perceived bang for their buck than they are the name on the panels.


So to answer your initial question I am no longer swayed by the hyped up marketing of the likes of Canadian Solar etc al (just been offered them at < €0.60 / watt ), and will shop around for the best value to meet my customers needs.

p.s. if you are interested in buying a container of the 8.33's as part of a forum buying group we have the storage and distribution capabilities - we've previuosly only used it for our own stuff, however we have deliberatley run down our stocks right now

 

[SolarCity]

A forum buying group sounds like a great idea but how would it work?

 

[SRE]

We've just installed Canadian Solar @ 53p brought the price down a treat so we're still making our margin and the customer is happy. Wish they did black though.

The idea of us collectively buying is great but we offer different panels to different customers based on their requirements and this is one of our strengths. We'd be like any other bigger installer if we opted for one panel. I also like having the wholesaler to go back to if there are any problems and if we didn't survive the next 12 months the customer has a clear route to get warranties resolved.

I think we need to sort out our sales techniques because the sales guys have the potential to wipe the floor with us in a reduced market. I was talking to someone yesterday who paid 13k for 9 panels at the back end of last year - they bought the best panels available, in their words "German not Chinese rubbish" but guess what - they had no idea what kind of panels or inverter, just that they were the best! Great salesman.

 

[Gavin A]

I love the 'american not chinese rubbish' line for Canadian Solar myself.... won at least one job off another company that had used that line when I explained that Canadian solar panels were entirely made in China and just had a head office in Canada, so the other company were conning them.

 

[Gavin A]

re group buying... we also have warehouse storage capability for about half a container load fairly easily. My main issue with this though is with price drops you can easily end up with stock left over that's been bought at higher prices than can then be had from the main distributors, plus we design from a range of different panels.

 

[Energetic]

A forum buying group sounds like a great idea but how would it work?

Need to organise a forum ****up... Drown our sorrows, when's the next trade event you're all going to?

 

[cbw]

^^^^^That sounds like a great idea^^^^^

 

[SRE]

I can't work this out - we got another enquiry yesterday, surveying this morning and our customer from last night is referring us to his mate over the road - that's nearly as many enquiries as we had in the whole of the 21p period.

 

[Worcester]

The sun's been shining (June was dull) everyone's spirits are up with Team GB doing incredidibly well in the Olympics - it's the feel good factor

 

[SRE]

Lets hope it lasts!