Unfortunately, lots of Sheriff Deputies have little knowledge. I dug up that plant and exhibited it at the county fair (Cincinnati). I showed a couple of people, who are law enforcement officials a leaf and they were aghast that I was growing "pot." It was the Tainug 2 variety - the Everglades 41 looks nothing at all like pot. I was surprised that during the fair, no one questioned the plant and, acting innocently, one evening said something to a deputy that it appeared someone had a pot plant on display. He said he wouldn't know a pot plant if he saw one. The next night, as the fair was closing, three deputies were headed to the area. I am the official photographer for the fair so I asked them what they were checking out - they said a pot plant. Two of them thought it was but one guy knew it wasn't - wrong cluster of the leaves. He was a cool guy - he also likes super hot peppers and I took him some. UGF, I don't have any plants except for a couple of bananas under LEDs, at least not until a few moments ago. I took the tomato that was under the CFL and put it under a 54 watt LED that, alas, has half the lights not working. My experiences with them so far, and it is limited to 14-watt red, blue and red/blue panels and the one 54-watt panel that use to work fine, is that they are great for seedlings and even mid-size plants but not powerful enough to set and develop fruit. That's why I am anxious to find out more - and hopefully get a good deal so I can afford to experiment with the 120-watt panel. Mike

I'm not solar at all yet, just a lucky holder of their stock. Gotta love the ones that double in a month's time. I can't afford solar panels, so I thought I would invest in a company that can produce the cash for me. I thought on the grid customers had to be cut off from power in the event of an outage to prevent utility workers from being zapped while repairing the lines? I take it these converters prevent the power from traveling back to the pole?

About a week after posting the above note in multiple sailing and solar energy related Internet forums (mid-December, 2006) I received a message from Solara AG informing me that they would replace the panels. They blamed Solara Energy (the US distributor) for not doing anything to help me. They also claimed that the warranty period for the panels is 2 years and not the 20 years listed on web sites in the USA, Australia and Great Britain. I wonder how all of these sites got the same wrong information? I also wonder how they compete when their competitors have warranties in excess of 20 years? Anyhow, they offered to replace the panels if I paid half of the shipping from Germany. This works out to 100 Euro or about $132 US. Considering that these panels cost me $2000, this was a bargain and I immediately agreed. Someone from customer service contacted me and sent invoice. I noted that the invoice was for a single panel instead of two and questioned this. The customer service person said that they would check on this and get back to me when the manager who approved this got back to the office. A week went by. I sent more e-mail questioning what's going on. Nothing...More e-mail from my side...nothing. I keep sending e-mail to everyone who was corresponding with me and nothing comes back. So at this point I'm stuck again. Other than flying to Germany and coming back with the panels (they actually suggested this :-), I don't see any solution. In case you have any doubts about the veracity of my reporting of the events, I've created a web page with all of the e-mail correspondence with the various parties. It's even color coded so you can easily see who sent what to whom. You can find it at http://www.geoffschultz.org/Solara/e-mail.shtml . I'll be headed off cruising to the Turks and Caicos at the end of February and it looks like I won't have working solar panels again. To me this is incredibly bad customer service and anyone who is thinking about purchasing solar panels manufactured by Solara AG should take this into consideration. -- Geoff Here is a link that might be useful: Solara e-mail link

There is a Florida University (U of Central Florida) sponsored site that tests solar panels and provides ratings. Their tests are about performance and not panel quality; however, I would expect that if a company submitted for testing they have some confidence their panels are well enough made to live through a testing lab run. Anyway, there is a bunch of good info at their site and the following link is to the test pages. http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/industry/testing/STcollectors/pool_ratings/index.htm