Great, that’s good info.
You mentioned Qcells, It think they would probably be a good balance of quality, performance and affordability. Obviously you would get more generation from using high efficient SunPower or LG, but it would push out the payback period. They might work out to be better ROI in the long run though, not sure, would be interesting to calculate that. Checkout our Best Solar Panels article if you haven’t yet, also Latest Solar Panel Technology article.
As for inverters however, I think you would do well to pay a bit more for panel level optimization, optimizers at a minimum and potentially micro inverters. This will increase your initial outlay, and probably bump up your payback a bit, but there are very good arguments to say you would have a much better ROI. Especially with your roof space, it is not a simple perfectly orientated south facing roof on a single aspect, there is quite a bit going on. Take a look at this thread, there are a few guys that have given insight into the ROI using Enphase micro inverters, you might want to ask them more:
You say you don’t want to monitor 400 panels, but there are two things the panel level optimization does 1. monitoring, and 2. making sure each panel performs at it’s best. Monitoring could be pretty useful, if you just whack up 400 panels and a few of them have issues, without that panel level monitoring you wouldn’t know, and if they are connected in a string, they will bring down the entire string of panels.
Food for though. I’m sure there will be other opinions on your install, @Den_Thomson, @mexicansolarguy, @Svarky, what do you guys reckon?
Cheers
Marty