Interesting thread here. Just wanted to throw in my two cents. We just bought a
Lagoon 450 that had previously installed walk on
panels made by Aurunco. They failed. I’m currently replacing them with 11
panels by Solara. Their
Power M series. They are semi rigid. We will have a total of 1300W. I just got 6 of them screwed and glued today. We are using outback controllers and a few
victron controllers. These will feed our large
Lithium Mastervolt system. Each different panel size needs to be kept together, so that you don’t mix voltages. Each one has its own diode as well to prevent over
heating. This Solara brand appears the be the best in class and will
work well with oblique sun angles, and partial shading. They are true walk on panels with a non skid surface that actually has a prismatic effect to capture more light.
I have to say that these panels are fully encapsulated and appear to be of exceptionally high quality.
In my opinion, the glass panels are certainly cheaper, but much more fragile, and they are typically mounted in areas where windage could become a serious issue on giant frames. I do agree that the Solbian flexible panels appear to be
cheap, and obviously the
cheap Chinese stuff is not built for a
marine environment. These Solara panels are made in
Germany and so far I’m very impressed and happy with the product. They aren’t cheap, but they appear to be very well engineered for the
marine environment.
We’ll have to see how they look in 5 years.