• Financial savings. You can expect your electricity bill to decrease significantly as soon as you switch to renewable energy (supplied by solar panels). You can further increase your savings by getting rid of installation costs…by doing the installation yourself. This is not a difficult task. With simple tools and some technical skills, you are good to go.

• Personal learning. When you build your own solar panels, you are presented with an opportunity to know and understand the system better. With practical knowledge, you will not need to hire a technician when things go wrong — you can troubleshoot the system yourself.

• Freedom to Customize. Because you are familiar with the installation site, you can customize your own solar design that fits your home. This is especially important if you have limited space. A custom-made solar panel can allow you to line every inch of your roof with photovoltaic material, unlike mass-produced ones.

• Fast. One weekend is usually enough for an individual to build his or her own solar panels. The more skillful you are, the faster you’ll complete your solar panel installation. Speed certainly comes with experience and practice.

• Sense of Fulfillment. Nothing beats the sense of fulfillment bubbling inside you after you have installed your own solar panels for your home…with your own abilities. You will feel a stronger sense of ownership for a solar panel system you have built with your own hands.

Solar panels are becoming more and more common. This is due to the increasing demand (and growing interest) in solar panels and other renewable energy technologies. The cost of solar panels has also decreased over the years. However this is still beyond the reach of many households. Thus even though solar panels have increased in popularity, it is still not as common as we desire it to be.

Fortunately, you can now have solar panels at home for a fraction of the usual cost. All you have to do is roll up your sleeves, apply some elbow grease and get your homemade solar panel together. For a “hands-on” person, this can be an exciting proposition.

Although some time and effort is expected, it is in fact easy to install your own solar panels at your home. The entire endeavor may entail some difficulties and challenges at first. But you need not worry about these obstacles. You can always focus on those activities you enjoy and engage an expert or a professional to help you with the rest.

Continue Reading:

1. Building A DIY Solar Panel – My Personal Experience
2. Homemade Solar Panels – Should You Even Roll Up Your Sleeves To Build One?
3. Homemade Solar Panels — Common Mistakes to Take Note Of When Building And Installing Photovoltaic (PV) Panels

Solar Panel Installation

Solar panel installation may be a daunting task for most people — it requires you to know where and how to site your solar panels. Moreover installation on roofs exposes you to the danger of falling. You are also at risk of electrocution while wiring your inverters.

But we do not have to be discouraged. Knowing what to do can help us tremendously and keep us away from danger. Some important installation know-how can make your job much safer and easier. Here are some points to consider before you install your solar panel…

In the northern hemisphere, we’d like our solar panels to tilt towards to south so that it can receive the most sunlight throughout the year. If we have a south-facing roof, all we need to do is line the solar panels along the surface of the roof. Otherwise we’ll need additional brackets to tilt the photovoltaic panels toward the south.

The roof is usually the best place to site your solar panels, but there are exceptions. Therefore you have to do a thorough survey to know where is the best place to locate your panels.

During the survey, you’ll have to take into consideration shading from plants and nearby structures. Shading has an adverse effect on solar energy production. The amount of electricity generated by photovoltaic cells reduces by a significant percentage with slight shading.

Through different seasons of the year, the position of the sun changes. So you’ll have to take this into consideration. An easy way to find the location that receives the most sunlight throughout the year is to use a Solar Pathfinder. This instrument shows you at a glance where shadows will be at different times of the day and different seasons of the year.

If the ideal location is on your rooftop, you’ll have to find out the maximum loading your roof can withstand. If the solar panels are too heavy, you will need to provide additional reinforcement to the roof structure before installation.

After the location is finalized, actual work can begin. You’ll have to get the correct solar panel mount to fix them at the ideal place — there are pole mounts, roof-ground mounts and flush mounts.

When installing on roofs, we frequently use flush mounts. This is the cheapest and easiest way to mount small solar panels. These are metal brackets that support both ends of a solar panel. It elevates the solar panels a few inches away from the roof to form a gap in between. This allows air to flow through, cooling the solar panels. It is vital to moderate the solar panel temperature so as to maintain the efficiency of photovoltaic cells.

Roof-ground mounts are grid-like structures that are used primarily for large solar panels. They can be installed on the ground or on roofs. A pole mount is used mainly for supporting a small, single solar panel.

After the solar panels are fixed, you’ll have to run and connect the electrical cables. The actual connections depend on whether you want a grid-tied or off-grid system.

With proper solar panel installation, each panel will be able to withstand strong winds and work efficiently for decades. You can also expect your property to increase in value with a solar energy system installed.

Continue Reading:

1. Solar Pathfinder – What Does It Do For You?
2. Installing Solar Water Heaters
3. Solar Panel Efficiency

Google assembled a 1.6 MW solar panel installation at their headquarters in Mountain View in 2007. After several months, they facilitated a study to find out if cleaning solar panels would make them more productive, thereby yielding more electricity.

The engineers focused on two separate sets of photovoltaic panels in Google campus — the flat ones in carports and the tilted ones on roofs. They gathered a plethora of data about the energy their solar panels produced. Observations were also made on the accumulation of dirt on both sets of solar panels.

Conclusion?

They found dirt accumulating on the surface of flat panels. On tilted panels, less dirt was found. This is because rain swept them away, leaving some accumulation at the bottom corners. After cleaning both sets of solar panels (after 15 months), energy output from the flat panels doubled! The improvement from tilted panels was marginal.

Both sets of solar panels were left untouched for another 8 months before they were cleaned again. This time, the flat panels showed a 36% improvement in electricity output while the tilted panels produced negligible gains.

The conclusion of this study illustrates 2 points:

1. Solar panels are best installed in a tilted position.

Like those solar panels in Google headquarters, tilted solar panels are less likely to retain dirt and occasional leaf. Blocked solar cells introduce high internal resistance and this devastates power production. In fact, just one cell without sunlight can cause an observable drop in energy output.

Fortunately, most of us are living away from the equator and chances are we have to tilt our solar panels considerably. Thus all we have to do is spend 5 minutes to wash away unsightly dirt that accumulates at the corner of your solar panels. You can do this by spraying water using a hose once a year.

2. Solar panels have to be cleaned once in a while.

If you have to install your solar panels in a flat position, you’ll stand to gain when you clean your solar panels every 6 months (or more often if you bother to). Obviously, the more energy your solar panels generate, the sooner you’ll be paid back your solar investment.

It does not take you more than 15 minutes to briefly wash down your solar panels. But once you put in this little effort, your solar panel efficiency shoots up and these photovoltaic power generators can again work as hard for you as when they first arrived.

Continue Reading:

1. Solar Panel Efficiency
2. How You Can Benefit from Feed-in Tariffs (FiTs) with Electricity Generated by Your Solar Panels
3. How To Build A Sun Tracking Mechanism to Increase Your Solar Panel Efficiency by 40%

Used solar panels can be found in many places and from different sources. You can approach homeowners who have solar panels that look old. You can also try your luck at recycling centers where broken solar panels can occasionally be found.

Yet the most effective way is to contact contractors or agents who specialize in solar panel installation. Many of them discard used solar panels before fitting new ones for their customers. Another source to get used solar panels are building contractors. They often renovate houses installed with photovoltaic panels and are glad to have someone dispose such items for them.

Most of these people may give you their used solar panels provided you offer to transport them away from the site. If they are unwilling to hand those pre-owned solar panels to you, try offering them a small fee that includes transporting the solar panels to your residence.

As you hunt for used solar panels, remember to look out for fatal flaws that may render your photovoltaic cells unusable. Here are some tips on what to look out for:

1. Cracked glass, condensation under glass and broken connections are common problems that cause owners to discard their solar panels. Fortunately there is a remedy for these failures.

2. Loose connections between solar cells may go unnoticed as you inspect them visually. Such faults can be picked up using a resistance meter, and joints with high resistance can be re-soldered together.

Although pre-owned solar panels are cheap, there are downsides to using them. One of the most obvious is the decrease in power output. After they are exposed to the sun for one or two decades, photovoltaic cells become less effective. Although marginal, you have to take this degradation into consideration, as you’ll need more solar panels as a result. Used solar panels also have a shorter lifespan, thus they can only serve you for their remaining years.

Needless to say, the low price of used solar panels allure many people to buy them. If the cost per watt can justify the purchase and they still have many more years to go, they can be excellent investments.

Therefore if you intend to install a used solar panel for your home, the payback period can be shorter than when you buy new ones. A trusted contractor is able to help you look out for used solar panels that are relatively and without damage. Therefore keep in contact with them, learn from them and build a relationship, and you’ll have a good-as-new solar panel at your home soon.

Continue Reading:

1. 3 Secrets You Didn’t Know About Building Solar Panels
2. Build Amazing Home Solar Power Systems Used by Families Who Don’t Want to Pay For Their Utilities
3. Do-It-Yourself Solar Panels – Electricity Conversion From Sunlight