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.
