Making Solar Panels

adam — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:43:17 +0000

Hey, Adam here.

I’m going to review a very helpful video that I used to complete my project. Please kick me if I sound like one of those schmucks reviewing stuff on Amazon!

I decided to jot down some quick notes about my DIY solar panel installation. This is my story about how I went about deciding on making solar panels for home and some of the research tools that eventually became my DIY Solar Panel Bible…

My predicament

TWO *MAJOR* PROBLEMS with solar panels:

1. Solar is very expensive

Using most calculators it’ll take you decades to recoup the cost. Depending on where you live it could be never. Putting this in the most simple (and obvious terms) the amount of energy that you harnass from your solar panels will be directly proportional to the amount of sunlight that you receive. This is called “Solar Power Rating”. In general you get a return on investment in approximately 13 years in most of the US. This is bad not only because it’s tough to predict that you may be where you live for 2 years much else 13 but the most recent Realtors of America survey advises that home sellers generally do not recoup the full cost of new solar panels installed (much like the much-maligned swimming pool)

2. Solar Power is complex

I have a few friends who have solar panels installed in their houses. The bigger complaint BY FAR is that when these systems fail (and all systems will), people who are able to service their units are in high demand, especially in areas such as San Diego and New Mexico. Sounds like a good business to get into! Simply put - if something happens to my gas water heater I know that someone will be out within four hours to fix it. I have a service contract, I’ve used it and I’m confident that they’ll be there if I need them in a pinch.

I’ll throw a third reason in. Unofficially, of course. My wife would simply look at this as another one of my geeky projects which I’ll lose interest in within a few weeks and leave her holding the bag. I’m man enough to admit this is true

CLICK HERE to see the video that I used to build my solar panels

What resources did I use?

I ended up using the video above as a visual instruction guide… it was very helpful. I felt comfortable that I had a good understanding of the ‘lingo’ but as with everything else it’s a different story when it comes time to put one of these suckers together. I wanted something that I could watch. This helped out a TON. It was relatively cheap (something like $50) which was really a half of of what the solar panel installation crews wanted per hour.

All I was expecting was a video which fired me through a standard solar panel construction and installation. Not only did it do that, but it did get into some details which I was surprised a general-purpose video would have… put it this way, I learned something in addition to getting the visuals that I was looking for. This was way more than I expected. I was pleased. I did try A LOT of other books and videos on diy solar panels, and most of them were either waaaay to basic or cleverly-disguised advertisements.

Be warned, however. This video was essential to the success of my project but I would NOT suggest making your own solar panels with just this video. I think it’s important to get multiple perspectives, especially because one of the purposes of going DIY is to get really educated about this project. The good news is that this is the only educational material that I spent money on that I’d recommend to someone else, the rest can be found checking our various message boards and wikipedia articles.

Well, that’s about it. Do feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions or to let me know what you thought about the video. I was very, very happy with my results, so do yourself a favor and read up on diy solar panels using your search engine of choice and check out this training video.

Click here to visit the solar video website

making your own solar panels

adam — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:01:03 +0000

Hi everyone. Adam here…

OK I’m going to try to be as precise and simple in this post as possible. A lot of websites out there talking about making your own solar panels approaching the issue in a very complex and sceinetific manner. Although I consider myself able to understand scientific concepts relatively quickly, as a newcomer to the subject matter it was very difficult for me to find a site which gave me the baby-level basics of making solar panels.

Please excuse my simplicity in this post, subsequent posts will definitely give you more meat and potatoes on the subject, but for now I thought it was important to review what we need in VERY simple terms.

Solar Cells

The first basic piece that you need are solar cells. They are the first, and probably easiest component of making solar panels. The reason? Simple. You will likely be buying this item off of ebay and for your rookie purposes you don’t need the best ones out there. I’ll review a few of the solar cells that I tried in later blog posts but suffice it to say that they were all more or less the same. To summarize, just head over to ebay and buy a few.

Solar Panels

The solar cells will be collected in groups into a single solar panel. This is where going homemade on your solar panels will save you a ton of money. At the end of the day a solar panel is a dumb setting for your worker bees – the solar panels – to live and collate their energy. You’re ultimately just connecting them together, which is all a solar panel is.

Solar System

Even more simplistic is the third item you “need” to create your own solar panels. A collection of solar panels is called a solar system. Simply put, for most applications you will need multiple solar panels. If you were to quote this out to a professional service they would likely quote you an appropriately-sized solar system along with a way to hook this into your house. The reason that this is done this way is for scale. Typically there is one connection from the solar system into whatever it is powering (be it a house or a simple outside light). By aggregating everything at one spot you allow to add on additional solar panels in the future.

Even Sunchips is going Solar — a few weeks ago they threw this video together detailing how Sunchips are now made using 100% Solar Energy. Pretty damn cool… I know it’s not a “how to”, but it’s a pretty cool video nonetheless.

Making Solar Panels

adam — Sun, 31 May 2009 04:00:13 +0000

Home projects have always been a passion of mine. Mix that with solar energy being a pretty hot topic these days, it only made sense for me to start tinkering with homemade solar panels.

I’ve started this blog to track my progress with diy solar panels, and hopefully give some other folks some helpful tips along the way. If you would like to know how to make your own solar panels, hopefully I’ll be of some help to you. I know I had a lot of internet buddies helping me out along the way!

making solar panels

Here you’ll see my first “real” solar panel that I made at home. I’m too embarrassed about my first product to put it out here:)

Word to the wise: just like with anything else, I firmly believe that those with patience and determination eventually find a way to reach their goals. You WILL get discouraged making solar panels, but don’t give up. It can be done. I did it, so can you.

I would also like to thank my wife and daughter for putting with with me. I made quite a mess and just maybe uttered a bad word or two while putting all of this together