When a half baked plan works.

[Every Road Leads Home]

Hi Rob,

Been on a summer hiatus and just catching up with where everyone's at. Tracked you down to this new screen name. Congrats on your move! Looks like it was a mini adventure, you sure don't like to do anything with out a bang! Glad you got the issues resolved though and now have a road ready trailer should you ever want to do some exploring. Still planning on making it through your neck of the woods in the not so far future.

 

[frater secessus]

From my reading, mono is more efficient?

In general mono is more space-efficient and poly is more money efficient, but you'd have to see the efficiency numbers on each panel to know for certain.   Mono is said to lose less output when panels are very hot.  There are also claims that poly is somewhat less affected by diffused light;  if true my theory is that since each cell is a bit larger it's less likely to be completely shaded.  I think it's a toss up and folks will do fine buying on $-per-watt if all other things are equal.  It's hard to go wrong.

In this case we are talking about a particular power rating (200W) which they would both put out so it comes down to the specific panels and OP's needs.  

• If I was using a PWM controller I might pick the one with the lower Vmp so that simpler charge controller would be running closer to rated output.  With MPPT it wouldn't matter.
• if space was tight and mono would fit and poly wouldn't, I'd get mono
• if I had space for both I'd get poly to save $$$.

Since I have a lot of roof real estate on the van I would have chosen poly but some local mono fell into my lap at a good price.