Building Solar Panels At Home

Going Solar? Planning to buy your very own solar panels! Why spend a few hundred dollars on purchasing them when you can make them at home at a much lesser cost with little effort. Here is how you can make it possible!

Raw Materials – It is quite easy to get hold of raw materials for creating your own solar panels. These may include broken solar cells, which are extremely cheap. Solar cells with amorphous silicon on glass are great, sturdy and easily reparable if broken. Indium Copper Selenide Cells are also easily available as tiles of glass.

Besides the essentials you will need wire glue, soldering iron, small flat head screwdriver, thin copper wire, lamp cord, solder, rectifier diode, sticky tapes, rechargeable nickel batteries, analog voltmeter and an AC converter.

Using And Preparing Broken Or Crystalline Cells – Typically larger pieces will produce more current than the smaller ones. The pieces should be soldered together well and then tested with a meter to check voltage. The larger pieces should be dealt with later once you get the hang of how to use smaller pieces together to produce electricity. While soldering you need to remember that the blue side is negative and the silver side is positive.

Finally you need to solder all the cells in a series to get more voltage. To charge batteries, a 12-volt panel would suffice. A diode is necessary while charging batteries through your solar panel so that the batteries do not give any power back to the panel while its dark leading to a loss of energy

Cells are extremely fragile and it’s better to install them in a sturdy wooden frame and make a permanent ready to use panel using RTV glue.

Putting Glass Amorphous Cells Together – A copper mesh is generally used to make a connection with the glass cell which come pre-scratched in the areas where the mesh needs to fit. Be careful as the wired mesh may sometimes fail to stick and the wires may come off and glass cells are easily broken. They may still be used if the glass doesn’t appear transparent which would mean that the photovoltaic part of the glass cell is completely damaged.

Copper Indium Selenide (CIS) Cells – These cells have tabs that are easy to solder and their negative and positive ends are marked distinctively. They look similar to amorphous cells and produce around 4.5 volts of power under a bright sun. These cells are well shaped and can be soldered together in series without much difficulty. The panel should be kept out of reach of curious people until you have soldered it and fitted it perfectly inside a solid frame. Do use a diode while charging batteries.

General Applications – These solar panels can be used for charging batteries, powering solar flashlights, night lamps, radios and even laptops.

Last but not the least while designing solar panels, you need to estimate your power requirements. Most electrical appliances don’t work on power less than a volt and more powerful and useful equipment work with a power of around 6 volts to 12 volts and you need factor this in your plans.