Can you MAKE solar electric pannels at home???

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Countryside : One Thread

You gotta understand...Hubby is very into doing things for himself, and sees no reason that an intelligent guy can't build the things. He just wants to know HOW. We have been stashing building materials for years, and figure to start building in the spring....no morgage! He would love to know how to get off the grid, without paying big bucks for the solar pannels. He is actually pretty good with stuff like that; he has done a great deal of wiring on our trailers, and all the new wiring at the church. Any thoughts/ideas????

-- Leann Banta (thelionandlamb@hotmail.com), February 16, 2001

Answers

Sure you can build solar electric panels yourself. It is just a matter of soldering (silver?) connectors to the silicon wafers and connecting the hundreds of cells, install in a frame and add a glass cover. I have watched them do it at the Honeywell research labs in Minneapolis back in the early '80's. Lab technicians did all the work. (They were testing cell electrical production with different levels of silicon purity.) However, current thin film technology panels may be cheaper.

-- Lynn Goltz (lynngoltz@aol.com), February 16, 2001.

Leann, For small power requirements (small fans, radios etc) I have built inexpensive arrays of LEDs (light emitting diodes) and utilized the reverse power generation action of them when exposed to light. You can buy LEDs in bulk sometimes for as little as .02 apiece. There are other crystals available, but I have to get the data from a friend at work.

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), February 16, 2001.

"Practical Photovoltaics" by Richard J Komp tells you how.

-- john leake (natlivent@pcpros.net), February 17, 2001.

Leanne, is it electricity you seek or are you really wanting heat? I am sure there are ways of do-it-yourself photovoltaics (for electricity) but I can't imagine they would be exactly cheap.

There are any number of designs of solar water heaters that might be useful and some are not difficult at all. I once lived in a little cabin with no hot water. I bought three rolls of the cheapest garden hose, joined them together and laid them, spread out, on the roof. I had a warm(ish) shower every day at 5pm.

-- john hill (john@cnd.co.nz), February 17, 2001.


If you coil that hose up and enclose it in a glazed box you'll get an even warmer to hot shower at the end of the day. As for making ones own solar electric panels, I wonder if it would really be cost effective to do it yourself?

-- Bob Johnson (Backwoods_Bob@excite.com), February 17, 2001.


Solar water heat is more practical for the do it yourself job. And if you can save on the grid bill, its next best to free power.

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), February 17, 2001.

If you did a good job of solar water heating it may be practical to get a bit of electricity from the hot water. I am not sure that a heat engine, such as Stirling cycle, would be impossible but it would surely be easy to use Peltier juntion units and maybe get enough during the day to run a light in the evenings. Peltier junction are (I believe) the clever things in car fridges etc, one side gets hot as the other gets cold when connected to a voltage and they work the other way too.

-- john hill (john@cnd.co.nz), February 17, 2001.

If it's hot water you're intetested in, you can get water that's too hot to shower in (put in a cold/hot shower valve to adjust the temp), very cheaply and easily. If you really want to have to take your shower while the sun's out, all you have to do is lay out one hundred or more feet of black poly pipe. It will get up to over 120 degrees, in my experience, in very short order (an hour, I;m guessing--I monitored my system, and it heated up a fifty gallon water tank by two or three o'clock in the afternoon. I didn't monitor a system of black pipe without a storage tank.) The tank enables you to have hot water twenty-four hours a day. The water in my tank got up to 118 degrees every afternoon, and was still hot in the morning, depending on how much I used in the evening.

There is a much more efficient way to build a solar water heater, though, which involves soldering a bunch of copper pipe together, manifolds at top and bottom, in a flat box covered with a cheap tempered glass sliding door panel (cost for glass is ten or fifteen bucks around here for a 34x76 inch or 46x76 inch, if you go to a glass dealer)

Total cost of black pipe system is under fifty bucks, under a hundred (plus a tank) if it uses a pipe, as it's necessary to assemble a two small manifolds from galvanized pipe, and under a hundred and a half (plus a tank) for a system which uses copper pipe. The copper pipe system gets water so hot that I typically have to fully open the cold water valve, then open the hot side a quarter turn or so, to adjust the temp.

I am planning to eventually draw up some plans to sell for five or ten bucks, but so far I haven't received much interest, so I have not done so.

I've been heating with solar during sunny months for twenty-six years now, and have had the bugs worked out of my systems for over twenty years.

It's really great to be able to take a LONG hot shower without worrying about the energy costs.

Solar water heating is the most cost efficient form of solar that exists, in my experience.

JOJ

-- jumpoffjoe (jumpoff@echoweeb.net), February 18, 2001.


I have worked with the Cadets at West Point on several solar powered cars for competion.These cars traveled in a ten day competion for 1500 hundred miles at an average speed of 55 MPH.The solar waffers,4by4 inches,were brought from various manufactures.It is very easey to sodder the waffers together useing silver sodder and makeing 24by24 inch pannels covered by an epoxy resin or glass or plexy glass.Make sure you have a oham meter to check your sodder joint.Its not that difficult.

-- George Zint (sunrayce98@yahoo.com), August 23, 2001.

Yeah... well i scored a box of about 60 8 by 4 cm solar panels in funny meter things that told you nothing your eyes couldnt, and had pictures of melanoma damaged chins in the backround (they looked english)fot $15 NZ (which is probably 10c anywhere else =( ). I got most of them out without casualty, and i wanna connect them all up and get 'em makin me some power to charge my RC car so i can take it far away, any advice?

P.S. Good luck to hubby!

-- Beavis Bungholium (cave_man88@hotmail.com), August 30, 2001.



Because of the monkey man!!!!!!!

-- Sean richard Whone (killermonkeys123@aol.com), October 02, 2001.

Moderation questions? read the FAQ