Lousy semi-rigid solar panels
In February 2025, a professional marine electrician installed six CMP 165W walkable semi-rigid solar panels on our catamaran. By January 2026 — less than a year later — all six had failed.
This does not appear to be an isolated experience. A December 2024 review on CMP's own website describes four out of four panels failing. A catamaran owner on a private listserv described an even longer saga — six panels installed in 2022, with three failing within the first year, and subsequent replacement cycles producing more failures, leaving nine of twelve panels dead.
An internal CMP email forwarded to me apparently by mistake identifies these as "Ahony panels.” Ahony is likely Shenzhen Ahony Power Co., Ltd., a Chinese manufacturer that offers commercial purchasers the ability to rebrand their products.
There is a CruisersForum thread on Ahony semi-rigid solar panels from April 2023. It starts with a member noting that four out of four 155W panels failed within three months. Another poster reported a similar experience: eight out of eight panels dead within three months.
Another data point: When Practical Sailor reviewed rigid and semi-rigid panels in March 2024, they narrowed the field to five of "the most highly recommended" rigid panels and seven semi-rigid panels. Whether considered and dismissed or never even considered by Practical Sailor, CMP made neither cut.
CMP quickly offered to replace all six panels, consistent with a pattern described by other reviewers. But I am preparing for a circumnavigation departing this fall, and felt I could not count on CMP panels given their multiple failures, nor would I be able to easily receive further rounds of replacement panels should that be necessary. (CMP will cover shipping only within the United States.)
CMP's posted warranty states that they reserve the right to either replace or refund failed panels "at our discretion." It also includes a sliding scale for refunds, should they elect that path, in which panels that fail within a year will be refunded at 100 percent. It took a couple of months and the intervention of the marine company that had installed the panels to secure a partial refund, though all of the panels failed in less than a year.
I have no personal grievance against CMP — I am posting this because the failure pattern across the three customers I could find (myself included), plus the posts on Ahony panels, suggests a systemic product problem.