Jump to content

Ebay PV panels for sale


joe90

Recommended Posts

Pity there's not more information in that listing.  Might be worth asking the seller what make they are, what their history is, and whether he'd accept an offer for a batch of panels.  Might even be worth asking if he'd do a deal for a big batch of them, and then organise a group buy on here, perhaps.  Need to get them from Norwich, though, which may add a fair bit to the cost.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

No recent activity on ebay, no feedback as a seller, and suddenly he has 300 panels to sell.  Perhaps a little whiff of fish?

 

Re transport, I got 25 panels that came on a pallet stacked flat.  A clever (experience?) trick was the seller taped a completely empty small cardboard box on the top of the stack, almost certainly to deter the couriers stacking other stuff on top.  I doubt you would want more than about 30 panels on one pallet and that will cost something like £100 from Palletways or similar.

 

It would be interesting if anyone is close enough to actually visit, see the panels and buy some and let us know.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So, that £40 bid: is it for one panel for £40 or the whole lot of £12'000? Seriously, that's an odd way to run an auction as almost nobody wants one panel. If I was confident it wasn't a scam and the panels were decent [¹] I'd happily pay £50 or somewhat more each for 40 panels but I don't want 1 or 300. How would I bid for that?

 

[¹] I'm not.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes it is an odd situation.

 

My guess is he doesn't really want to sell them by auction, he wants you to just contact him and negotiate.

 

A better way might be to package them up in lots of 16 panels (4KWp) and sell them in batches like that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, Nickfromwales said:

If you can get them for close to the start price, that's about £28 per panel

 

They are a slightly smaller version of the panels I have made by Trina Solar. Those are 230W panels, mine are 250W.

 

Looking at the pictures of the back, they look to possibly be suffering from "degraded backing sheet"  Mine were advertised as that, though the reality was only 2 of the batch I bought had any sign of problems and were easily fixed.  It does appear this make, the backing sheet along the joint lines between individual cells is prone to cracking, perhaps due to it getting hotter there?  At least the seller of mine mentioned that "defect" 

 

Mine claimed to be from a solar farm that was upgraded.  There certainly seem to be a lot of these for sale, this seller has a warehouse full and advertising different sized batches as well, e.g 20 panels for a starting price of £750

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, joe90 said:

My only thought is inverters have a “life”, do we know how old they are? How much life is left?

If they are as old as the panels, 7-8 years, they are probably near end of life.  But you can get a replacement for about £300 so still a good buy, if split between 3 would be about £1500 each, similar cost to mine.

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

44 minutes ago, ProDave said:

If they are as old as the panels, 7-8 years, they are probably near end of life. 


Panels have a life of 25 or 30 years - the ones at CAT are over 20 years old and still at something like 93% of initial install power, and there are some that were installed in Switzerland in degraded less than 1% per year and they were installed in the late 1980’s. 
 

As @ProDave says about the inverters, they probably have 3-5 years left in them, and if they are kept cool could probably go for longer still. 
 

Worth noting the aluminum channel will probably be worth £6-800 as it is - definitely the makings of a DIY ground array there !

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The panel degradation is a tricky calculation, similar to German cars in a way.

Many panels were sold with a minimum output, this was achieved by having panels that started overrated.

So a 250W module may well have been a 275W module.

But the degradation was based from 250W.

 

My Mother always bought Mercedes for 30 years, she thought the depreciation was lower.  I pointed out that it was calculated on the base model and did not take into account any extras, and as anyone who bought a Mercedes in the 70's, 80's and 90's knows, everything was an extra.

Edited by SteamyTea
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...