Why don't used PV panels appear on the market?

These rarely appear. Surely there are users with limited roof space wanting to replace their old lower yield panels for more vooma!??

I’ve bought myself into a corner years ago, 3 x 310w panels and 2 x 200w Tenesol panels.

Sold them with ease 2nd hand.

Not so easy if the panels where “permanently” mounted on a roof.

You will seldom find secondhand panels. I have seen it a few times and every time it was small panels, the owner bought a few panels to test, 2 years later he decides to upgrade and then he cant find the same size panels, so his forced to buy new panels and get rid of the old.

Another reason imo, why sell it if its working, its suppose to last 20years plus.

In the few years I’ve been involved in Solar, I have installed new panels, add new panels to existing systems, moved and relocated old panels, but not once did I replace or remove old panels.

you might be lucky enough to find some, but they get bought so quickly that you never even know about them.

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They have a long lifespan.
Half the cost is putting them up there to begin with, taking them down is labour intensive.

Newer panels are cheaper for more watts, so you’ll sell second hand for a fraction of what you purchased. Which combined with the labour cost makes it a questionable choice.

On the other hand the wattage of newer panels is not THAT much greater that you’ll want to free up the roof space to replace with new higher wattage ones, when you could just add some new ones as extra elsewhere on the roof instead.

So unless you have completely and utterly run out of roof space and have no other upgrade options it just doesn’t make all that much sense I think.

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So PV panels are good news compared to inverters or batteries…
Are there any PV panels that one should avoid?

Stay with tier one panels. Stay clear of the cheap Chinese shop no name brands.

A nice rule of thumb, buy the brands that you can generally find at online stores.

Pm me if and when you decide to buy, I can give you a no obligation quote you can use to compare.

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I’ve seen second-hand panels on marketplace or gumtree, but it is almost always smaller panels, often from camping rigs. As such they are barely used and often in excellent condition.

For myself, I have six 150Wp Tenesol panels very similar to the ones TTT has. They take up about the same roof space as 3 x 300W modules, rigging them in series gets me the same number of cells and the same voltage as 3 x 300W… so why on earth would I replace them? Well, they did require an additional MPPT since they could not be combined with others… so that might have been a reason in different circumstances. In my case, since I also upgraded MPPTs previously… I already had a spare handy. And since I’m in R & D, I never get rid of old hardware. It goes in a box until needed for some project in the future… :slight_smile:

Had 2 x 200w and 3 x 310w panels. Sold LONG time ago. :wink:
Now I have lots of the 350w Canadian ones, with 2 x 355w ones added by Jaco recently.