Cruising Sailors Forum Archive

Meant Sunware, not sunwize. Mine are semi-flexible

Sunware is made in Germany. Mine are made by a Japanese company (made in Japan) who later moved manufacturing to China. The Ganz panels sold by Defender appear to be from the same maker. Both designs are semi-flexible or semi-rigid (depending on your point of view), and have some type of plastic or polymer coating rather than glass. Both designs claim they can be walked on and bent in a smooth radius up to 3%.

I owned Sunware panels on three boats over a 10+ year period and had a 100% failure rate. Most failed within 5 years and the longest lasted 8 years. I believe the reason they failed is because they were stepped on, but only occasionally. Sunware and Ganz advertise that you can do that, but be careful about localized flex and point loading. If you drop your RIB dinghy on it the panel will fail (I know that for a fact). Best is to stay off them if possible.

The panels I'm using now are 6 years old and zero failures, so far. I bought two spares so I can replace a failed unit with identical matched panels. You never know when a model will go out of production or updated in some way that changes the electrical properties. Mine are wired in series-parallel so I have two "pairs" on each side of the boat.

The Sunware are higher quality, but also more expensive last time I checked.

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