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Swapping 11 year old 265w panels for used 315w panels with Enphase M215?

exime

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Dec 21, 2022
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I have an existing ~11 year old Enphase M215-based system (with 2 or 3 warranty replacements in that time span) using 265w panels. I ran across a post for some used Qcell 315w panels (40.29 Voc) locally that should physically fit on my racking (I left the rails a little long), and I am interested in getting more area under the curve. I am prone to making decisions based on them being interesting, not necessarily financially prudent, but I wanted to make sure there aren't any major gotchas.

The array is oriented pretty close to 135 degrees, so I'm already off-azimuth from nominal. Looking through data for this year, I'm not seeing any inverters hit more than about 210 watts. I think when everything was brand new, they did clip a small amount.

Would 315w panels (probably degraded a bit) on M215s be a terrible idea? On a cold day (midwest), would I potentially be in danger of exceeding the input voltage?
 
Add to your system, don't replace if they're still working well.

I got most of my panels ultracheap from other people "upgrading" their panels that were still working fine. They even exceed their output ratings sometimes. Great value for me, bad value for the person who sold them to me.

Depends on the voc limits of the inverters.
 
I agree .
You have a good working set .
So wy not place a extra one with a extra mppt if your old one not can handel the extra panels.

This way your fine for the future to .
Never know if you go for a electric car or other upgrade.
 
Yeah, acknowledged. I do have one half dead panel in this array, but the other 13 are all producing within a pretty tight tolerance of each other every day. My (not fully rational) thought process is that I could get the "new" panels for about $100/ea and sell my old panels for some non-zero amount. It is, however, a lot of work on a 6/12 pitch roof.

It looks like the older M215s had a max input of 45 volts, and I just found Enphase's compatibility checker, which calculated a max Voc of 43 volts for the panels I'm looking at.

I'm planning on adding 18 new panels and a hybrid inverter to my new covered deck as soon as I can find an electrician to work with that doesn't give me a "I don't want the job, but I'll do it" bid.
 

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