I have purchased UL solar panels before. Only small 10W ones, but they bear a sticker from a California Address, but a bit of research which I don't have in front of me turned up the exact factory in China that they were made in - although the factory basically sells them by the container load. I contacted UL solar directly and got a better price than the Ebay price on those that I bought. They were reasonably constructed of standard appearing materials, tempered glass, eva, cells, eva, tedlar type polyflouro plastic on the back. They did perform at approximately their specs. That said, I see that Sunelec Miami has panels (which I have also bought) of similar quality construction to the ones I bought for less at present. Sunelec is not big on customer service, but they have generally among the best prices. If you can reach Mr. Kimball directly he is knowledgeable and helpful, but they have an army of call takers that seem to me to be determined to avoid that, and my experience and opinion is that the order takers seem to know little about what they have, and what they are selling, so if you go with them make sure you know what you need from their inventory. You would in my opinion, get much better advice from here on what you need for a system, and as a general rule I try to avoid relying on only vendor advice anyway. Especially seeing some of the reliable folks you have gotten responses to your query from here already.
Now, if it were me, seeing that you have the batteries that you have in hand, if I could get the hang of soldering, I would rig one of Glen's dirt cheap controllers to start with to regulate the input as a charge controller, (I have installed a few modified ones that he rigged up for a project for me and am not aware of any failures with them) and if funds permit a second rigged as a load controller, and then I would put the extra savings into as much solar to charge them as I can reasonably get and the controller can handle as I rig it. In this way, for about the least amount of money, I could get basic charge and load control functions, and then as much charging current into the batteries as I could manage.
The reason that I think a load controller is important is that almost invariably when I look at systems that I have rigged after a time that have failed, the cause is almost invariably that the batteries have failed. For systems without automatic low voltage cut offs, this is often do to people running the batteries to too low of a state of charge and thereby seriously shortening the number of charge/discharge cycles their batteries will survive which of course means premature failure. A low voltage cut off enforces a bit of discipline on the user as long as they decide to never bypass it and avoids negligence in forgetting to continuously monitor the state of the batteries. For the remote off grid systems I put in at various generally poor communities without experience with electricity or batteries, I will in general no longer install a system without an automatic load control if I can avoid it, but even for my own systems with batteries, I make sure that I have them to help avoid this most common cause of battery murder - batteries over time, being about the most expensive part of any off grid solar power system because of their shorter life span than other components. The 10.4V or so cut off of most cheap inverters is far too low to maximize the utility of the golf cart batteries that it appears that you have on your system. Anyway, this is just my opinion. Rich
