Walk any solar exhibition and you’ll pass a hundred panel brands, most offering roughly similar glass at roughly similar prices. We’re deliberately picky about which of them make it onto our vans. Customers sometimes ask what actually separates a premium panel from a cheap one. Here’s the honest answer.
The problem with “good enough”
A solar panel is a 25 year commitment bolted to your house. Over that horizon, small differences compound: half a percent of extra efficiency, a fraction less annual degradation, a manufacturer still solvent in year eighteen when a warranty claim arrives. The cheapest panel on install day is rarely the cheapest panel per kWh generated over its life.
Efficiency: the headline number, read carefully
Module efficiency tells you how much of the light hitting the panel becomes electricity, and it decides how much power fits on your roof. The panels we fit use the latest cell technologies, including back-contact designs that move every wire and busbar to the rear of the panel. The front face is pure, uninterrupted black silicon: more active surface collecting light, and materially better behaviour in partial shade, where a shaded corner doesn’t collapse the whole string’s output the way it can on conventional panels.
Degradation: the number nobody advertises
Every panel loses a little output each year. The difference between a poor panel and an excellent one is roughly double the annual loss, which quietly becomes thousands of kWh over the system’s life. We specify modules with some of the lowest degradation figures in the industry, so the output you buy in year one is closer to the output you still have in year twenty.
Bankability: will they be there in year eighteen?
A 25 year product warranty from a company that disappears in year six is a piece of paper. We fit panels from tier-one manufacturers with global production scale, because in solar, scale is a warranty in itself.
All-black, always
Every array we design is full black, mounted on all-black hardware: Renusol rails, clamps and end caps on-roof, or GSE trays for a flush in-roof finish. The result reads as one deliberate surface rather than an appliance on the roof. More on that in our mounting guide.
Matched to the system
Because we design around a tightly curated panel shortlist and a small range of battery platforms, every string is sized within tested limits, every inverter pairing is one we’ve installed many times, and every warranty lines up. Panel choice isn’t a menu item; it’s an engineering decision we’ve already made carefully, and one we keep re-making as the market moves. See the current standard on our Solar PV page.
This guide is general information, not advice for your specific property. Every Powergy proposal is modelled on your actual roof, usage and tariff. Figures reflect typical UK conditions at the time of writing.