I'll offer a different situation as allegory. I recently got four small solar panels, wired them up, and mounted them to a board with epoxy. After a few weeks outside, three of the four were cracked down the middle, and thus dead. What went wrong? I used epoxy. The board and panels expanded at different rates, and the forces cracked the panels. What I should have done (and plan to do with my new panels) is mount them either with an adhesive that can expand and contract, or mount them to an intermediary layer that can expand and contract. Perhaps the problem you are experiencing is something like this: not necessarily the lexan, but how it's mounted. Perhaps the lexan is expanding at a different rate than the frames, or the frames are expanding at a different rate than the material that they're embedded in. Or perhaps it's not thermal expansion. It could be settling, or warping of wooden structural elements, or all sorts of things. I wouldn't blame the panels for being warped. It seems to me like an installation problem.

The home will already have composite shingles and I haven't even seen the HOA documents yet so not in the near future. I wouldn't want to be the only house with them in the area so I'd wait until others decide it's interesting and then only when the roof needs to be replaced. I think that will happen as efficiency improves and price of energy increases so my best guess is maybe 10 years? How much of a disaster will it be to put it in later if I do nothing now in preparation for it?

It looks like you can get a panel of suitable size for around $300 from the www.earthsolar.com site above. Going with a DC pump would be a good idea given that's what these panels produce, but you'd need some voltage regulation so they didn't burn up your motor when they were putting out power levels other than what your pump motor needs. Probably the easiest way to achieve it would be to use the panel to charge a battery pack and then power the pump off the battery pack. That would also keep the pump going at normal speed on cloudy days or into the evening. You might want to use a timer to shut it off at night so as not to overly drain the batteries. A setup like this would be rather expensive. Given the low power drain of a small AC powered pump, I'm not sure it's worth the effort. It'd surely be a lot easier to just get some UF (underground feeder) cable and just bury your wire and connect it to your home's power.

How do people feel about the announcement today that Lowe's is starting to stock the Andalay solar panels starting in some California stores? Yes, I've seen solar panels for sale at Costco and Home Depot before, but these are supposed to be much more DIY-friendly in their integrated wiring and mounting systems - granted a fairly expert DIY-er comfortable with working at the electrical panel and on the roof. I think it's very interesting for areas like California that have aggressive tiered pricing models for electricity, because each household can look at their marginal usage and size up enough modules that make economic sense. For example, the retail price is $893 per 175 kw panel. My baseline electricity rate is about 0.11-0.15/kwh, and I have poor afternoon sun coverage, so about 5-7 hours of good sun per day. If I can get about 1 kwh per panel per day, that's 0.11-0.15, or about $50/year, for about a 19-year payback period, not a great value prop. BUT, I usually creep into the 0.25/kwh tier every month, and if I size up a couple of panels to keep me below that tier, I'm saving $100/year, for a reasonable 9-year payback. Plus if you have a life event like having kids that increases your permanent usage, you just buy another panel and link it in. Or I think many households around here that have a pool or several kids are already in the 0.35-0.45/kwh tiers for even quicker 4-6 yr payback periods. It could be even more compelling with time-of-use pricing, which I think might be become mandatory once PG&E starts shifting my town to Smart Meters in about a month. My wife works from a home office, so our electrical usage does not drop during the day (though it doesn't peak either). There's even an extreme summer time-of-use program that PG&E offers, that has 20x normal rates for a few peak afternoons each summer in exchange for about a 30% discount the rest of the summer - for my household that doesn't need or have A/C, could result in another 10-15% savings over standard tiered rates....