LG Solar panel review - updated Feb 2022
The giant Korean company LG has been heavily involved for many years in solar panel and solar battery manufacturing.
Both products have been very successful in Australia, but Australia is a very small market compared to the rest of the World,
and LG sadly announced in Feb 2022 that they were stopping manufacturing solar panels as early as June 2022.
This will be a huge blow to many solar retailers who have sold almost no other brand of panel.
The best of the LG range, the 'NeOns' were on par with SunPower Maxeon and REC Alpha for quality, and price.
In Perth, we saw Infinite Energy, one of the state's largest solar companies, announce recently that they were pulling out of the residential solar market,
citing an unsustainable market for premium products in the Australian residential space.
Over the eleven years that Solar4Ever has been operating in Perth it's been abundantly clear to me that the initial huge gap between what you got for your money with a premium panel in terms of warranty, efficiency and technology has narrowed and narrowed until there is very little to justify paying often three times as much for a premium panel.
LGs decision to exit will also be an issue for those looking to purchase solar equipment that is not made in China as the options for that have reduced substantially now.
LG have also suffered a lot of cost with recalls on the RESU home solar batteries in Australia.
By all accounts they are managing the recalls as well as can be expected under the trying shipping and supply chain issues currently afflicting just about everything coming into and going around Australia.
LG typically relied on making their battery sales by piggy-backing with inverter manufacturers, but the trend over the past few years has been for inverter manufacturers to also become battery manufacturers, hence LG losing substantial sales.
To counter this drift away, LG have partnered with Chinese inverter manufacturer Goodwe to have their own LG Inverter, which is, of course, simply a rebadged Goodwe.
I would have thought a huge electronics company like LG would be perfectly capable of making thir own solar inverter, but perhaps they are just testing the water.
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This review was written by Andrew MacKeith, Solar4Ever service manager since 2011.
Solar4Ever is located in Morley (Perth), WA 6062
