Want to create your own solar panel? Well, you’re in luck because it’s not difficult at all – even if you’re relatively new to creating your own power systems and have just started going green!
The entire process of creating a solar panel can be broken down into about 10 main steps, depending on what you’re looking for, how much power you want to generate, and how many solar panels you’re interested in making.
How much does it cost to make your own solar panels? You can create one that saves you quite a bit off your electricity bill for under $200, if you do it correctly.
If you want to completely eliminate your utility bill, or go 100% “off the grid” then it will cost more and you’ll probably need at least 4-5 solar panels along with good sunlight exposure and environmental conditions.
We’ll be going into each of these steps in more detail in future articles, but here are the basic steps you need to follow:
Step 1: Calculate how much power you need to generate, and therefore how many solar panels you’ll actually need.
As a general rule of thumb, an average house in the US consumes anywhere from 10,000 Watts to 30,000 Watts of power each day. Yours may be more or less depending on how many appliances you use, whether or not you have air conditioning, and other factors. If you’re in doubt, look at your recent utility bills to get an idea of your house’s average power consumption.
A typical solar cell produces about 2 Watts of power – so you’d need around 5,000 – 15,000 individual solar cells to completely power your house. That many cells would require at least 5-15 individual solar panels, if not more.
Of course, you don’t need to completely power your house with them – if you just want to halve your electric bill, you could do that as well and still make your DIY solar panels well-worth your time.
Step 2: Once you know how many solar cells you’ll need, get the cells on eBay by searching for “chipped” or “broken” solar cells. They’re cheap, and they work almost as well as the fully functional cells.
You could also check your local hardware store, but eBay is the most convenient option here.
Step 3: Now, you need to gather the other parts necessary for your solar panels. Here’s what you’ll need besides the cells themselves:
- Thin plywood (Local hardware store)
- Flexi-glass about 0.5 inches thick (hardware store).
- Tin-coated tabbing wire (look on eBay).
- Silicone (for sealing up holes).
- Solder iron (for connecting the cells).
- Rosin flux pen (for connecting your cells).
- UV Protector (to avoid damaging your new solar panel).
- Volt meter.
Once you have all those parts together, you can start assembling your first solar panel.
Step 4: First, prepare the plywood by cutting it to the approprate width and height, cleaning it, and making sure that all the cells you’ve collected can actually fit on it.
Also, apply a few layers of UV protector to the wood to protect it from sun damage.
Step 5: Now, you need to attach the solar cells themselves together. This is quite a complex process, and I can’t go into all the details here – but here are the basics of what you need to do:
First, find the tabs on the backs of all your cells and drop a small amount of solder (using an iron) onto their backs.
Connect all the cells together using the tabbing wire, with the front of one cell attaching to the back side of the next cell, and so on until you have completed rows.
Step 6: Now, you need to affix all these rows of cells to the back of your plywood using silicone.
You’ll also need to attach wires to each row of cells, and then drill a hole in the back of your plywood so that you can run wiring from the cells themselves out to your battery and/or other power storage system.
Step 7: Attach the flexi-glass to the border of your plywood and cover the cells, again using the silicone.
Step 8: Fill in any gaps or holes (around the holes that your positive and negative wires are coming through, or elsewhere) using the silicone.
Step 9: Drill a breather hole into the bottom of your plywood near where the wires come out to avoid moisture build-up inside the solar panel.
Step 10: Now, join the electrical wires from your solar panel to the panels junction box – which will connect to your charge controller, and to your batteries.
You should consult with your local hardware store when doing this to make sure you have the proper volts and amps for your wiring – they’ll know what to do if you can show them your setup.
Now you’re done – to test it out, simply put your cells in the sun, attach a volt meter, and see what kind of power your new solar panel is outputting!
Again, this was a very, very simplified overview of the entire process and I’ll be going into more detail on each step here and giving more detailed instruction in future articles.