Canadian Solar panel review - Updated August 2023




Canadian solar are a Canadian company, they pay tax in Canada. They are not a Chinese company.
They make solar panels in Canada.
They make solar panels in China.
The ones we get in Australia all come from their Chinese factories.

They have a good crew of people based here in Australia, pictured above from a few years ago.

We used to install thousands of Canadian Solar panels. Easily our top seller for a long while.
One day everything changed.

Sometime around 2018 a decision was made for Canadian to go 'up-market'
That meant higher prices.
The problem was that we couldn't see any reason to justify the higher price.
They weren't 'N' type cells, metal backed, or anything like that.
They were regular panels being sold at a much higher price. Why?

So we stopped recommending them, and they went from our top seller to a no seller.

Fairly recently I noticed that a couple of local wholesalers were offering a 415W 'P' type HiKu model.
Reasonably priced. About the same as the equivalent JinKo, Trina, JA, LonGi.

OK, so happy to offer that, and with a 25 year warranty and the 'easy to sell' brand name, why not?

I can see on their international web page that they have a genuinely up-market panel coming. The 'Hero'
Dual glass, 'N' type, Heterojunction cells. Nice.
I think we will have some takers for that when it lands in 2023 if the price is reasonable.

Canadian Solar inverters.
Canadian Solar International (CSI) manufacture a range of single and three phase inverters after initially 'testing the market' with some re-badged ones.
I can only see Western Power approval for a 5kW single phase model at the moment and no three phase models.
I'll update this when we have installed a few as we never touched the earlier 're-badged' models, but happy to test out their own.
Bit more skin in the game when they make them, themselves.
5 year warranty with 'extension to 10 years'? Hope the extension is free.



If you want a quote for solar with Canadian panels, or anything else then call us on...

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This review was written by Andrew MacKeith, Solar4Ever service manager since 2011.