Standard Panel Sizes (Dimensions)?

[ShaKen]

Hi all

Can anyone advise if panels come in standard sizes?

I’m planning fitting a 200W panel at some point before the summer, but was wondering if on the future I wanted to move to a 300W panel (or any other) whether I could reuse the mounts I will bond onto the roof, or whether the panels come in all manner of random sizes and thus they may not fit.

Obviously I do understand that typically panels get larger as output increases.

 

[Phill D]

i think you might find that dependent on the type of cells and frames used they will be all manner of shapes and sizes.
as a result of looking at the available footprint sizes when i acquired ours I am fairly certain that a 300W will not fit the same foot print of a 200w no matter what.

 

[DBK]

If you've got room for 300W fit that and a suitably sized controller from the outset. Two 150W panels will probably be easiest to fit, being lighter.

If you go for 200W then adding a 100W panel (with the same number of cells) in parallel later would be preferable to throwing the 200W one away. But you will probably need to replace the controller or give the 100W panel its own. The latter would be better.

But to answer your original question, I can only suggest looking at different suppliers. Most seem to increase in both directions because they just use bigger cells. If one dimension remained static they would need more cells which might be more expensive.

 

[autorouter]

A single cell is about 3 volts. If the total voltage is over about 35V they have to think about electric shock protection, so it's normally 9 or 10 in series. Then they parallel them to make the wattage capacity. So a layout of 9 x 4 or 10 x 6 is quite popular. However the cells are different sizes so the total panel size will vary.