How To Build Solar Panel

In this final part of the “How To Build Solar Panel” series, we’ll impart the finishing touches that make your solar panel project a winner. You’ll discover how to push your solar panel system up one notch so you’ll have a world-class DIY solar panel.

Here, I’m assuming that resources like money, time and skills are not lacking. What we’re trying to push for is a solar panel that will make you proud.

The Solar Panel Frame

The best material to use for the solar panel frame is aluminum. This is a material that will not rust easily and it’s able to carry away additional heat that may be trapped inside the solar panel. This is particularly important since heat can diminish the efficiency of the photovoltaic cells.

Diodes

The diodes you should be using are the Schottky types. These diodes have a much lower forward voltage drop so less power is wasted. And when the temperature gets higher the forward voltage drops further.

Solar Panel Cover

If budget allows and there is no hail at your area, the best cover that your solar panel can have is made of non-reflective glass. Solar panels covered with non-reflective glass can enjoy significantly higher efficiency because greater proportions of sunlight reach the solar cells.

Battery

If you intend to power outdoor equipment like sprinklers and gate openers, your battery will need to be sheltered from the rain and dew. Unfortunately it may be impractical to house these indoors as we’ll then need very long wires that may also be a safety hazard if it’s left lying around.

You can put the battery (or batteries) into a waterproofed electronics housing and seal up the opening (for the wires). In this way rain or dew will not cause short circuit to the battery.

By implementing all of the above tips to your solar panel project, you can surely make for yourself a world-class DIY solar panel project.

Continue Reading:

1. About
2. How To Build Solar Panel (Part 1 of 3)
3. How To Build Solar Panel (Part 2 of 3)

A few years ago, in 2008, I had a rude awakening as I received an energy bill of over $250. Even though my household energy consumption remained the same, the bill increased dramatically over the months.

As it turns out, the energy rate has risen again! And this is happening more frequently than ever. The effect of rising oil price has affected many families, including mine. Yet when the price of oil dipped, there wasn’t much adjustment downward.

Naturally, I was angry!

Few weeks later, I met up with a friend who proudly introduced me to his roof-mounted solar panels. I was excited. Because if I install the same thing on my roof, I won’t have to pay energy bills again.

After a little digging, I realized all these promise of harvesting energy from the sun doesn’t really pay off financially. Here’s what I found out:

- A typical solar panels installation costs at least $20,000 for a complete setup. Most of them cost more.

- With such upfront cost, it’ll take me at least 30 years before my energy supply becomes (technically) free.

But I was hooked on this idea of harnessing energy from nature, especially when sunlight is abundant where I live. There was no turning back. This propelled me on the search for an affordable energy system that can take me off grid.

My search began at major retailers but it proved futile. After researching on the Internet and talking to a few friends, my only alternative is to make a DIY solar energy system myself.

I was confident of this approach as I graduated with an Engineering degree.

Five weeks and a bruised knuckle later, I had my first failed project. Everything was well planned on paper and my calculations were precise. Sadly, practical application required more than just theory derived from the books I referenced. This is especially so for DIY solar panel projects.

I’ve already lost hundreds of dollars on trial and error. Ouch! It was at this juncture I decided to get proper instruction to build a reliable solar panel system.

With high hopes, I searched around for a good guide to help me. I bought one guide after another, hoping each guide can help me build my DIY project.

Another two hundred and seventy bucks later, my bookshelf and hard drive was replete with instructional guides. But none of them helped. Again, I was disappointed. It seemed my dream of living off-grid was shattered.

All I found were nothing but rehashed material from textbooks and many of them simply copied each other’s work. Some were so difficult even an engineering graduate like me finds it too time consuming to understand. Others lack crucial information that left me high and dry. Yet others lacked customer support.

Then I decided to put all these DIY stuff away and call it quits. It just didn’t work out…

I went back to my usual life and paid my regular energy bills.

Five months later, I was looking for an electrical component for a client and bumped into a young lady, Susie, looking for a similar item. Curious, I asked her what she wanted these components for. (It was unusual for ladies to shop around for such electrical stuff…)

I was shocked to learn she had almost completed her own DIY solar panels. She just doesn’t look like she can handle any tools, let alone build anything at all.

Excited, I went online to scrutinize the website she recommended:

View Here => http://www.diysolarpanelsworld.com/diysolar

It looked like one of those websites I bought from, so I was a little apprehensive. But I bought it anyway. By now, my enthusiasm has dried up. Yet somehow my curiosity led me to begin building a DIY solar panel.

One weekend later, I had my first DIY solar panel leaning against my garage door waiting to be installed. I was pleased, and very thankful for meeting Susie at the hardware shop.

This guide she recommended truly makes building your own solar panels easy to understand. Best of all, it shows you how and where to get very affordable components and materials to build your project.

With the low cost involved, it probably takes only 3 years before the cost of the hardware is fully paid back. After that, energy will be totally free for my family and me. Of course, we’ll soon be living entirely on renewable energy.

For the first time in my life, living on free electricity became a reality.

If you have the aspiration to build your own DIY solar panels like I did, I encourage you to take the first step… Look for a good instructional guide and take action to build a system that can harness free energy from the sun. You, too, will be glad you did.

You can learn a lot about building DIY solar panels here and also see many newbies accomplish amazing projects on their first try:

http://www.diysolarpanelsworld.com/diysolar

Continue Reading:

1. About
2. How To Build A Personal DIY Solar Power System With Less Than $99
3. Homemade Solar Panels — Common Mistakes to Take Note Of When Building And Installing Photovoltaic (PV) Panels

Before we discuss about how to do this, let’s take a look at some other ways you can improve your PV panel’s efficiency for completeness sake.

How Else To Improve Your Solar Panel Efficiency?

Many solar panels fare around 11 to 15 percent in efficiency. Better PV panels perform at an average of 16+%. With better performance, you won’t have to spend more money on PV panels. If you are using a grid-tied system, you can also offset more of your utility bills every month.

The most obvious way to improve efficiency is to change your PV panels. There are many manufacturers with different PV panel models that perform at different efficiencies.

By choosing a good PV panel, you can make sure your solar power system pumps out the required amount of electricity every season of the year. However this is not an option for those of us who have already installed arrays of solar panels on our roof.

Another way to improve solar panel efficiency is to make sure they are installed in the correct orientation. All solar panels in our country (and other parts of the globe in the northern hemisphere) have to face southward.

If this is not possible, you have to make adjustments to compensate for it. Also, the pitch and tilt of your solar panel can affect how much sunlight falls on it throughout the day.

If you have a solar tracker, it can optimize the amount of sunshine you receive on your solar panels. These devices make the PV panels face the sun squarely through the day. For small solar power systems, the improvement in electricity production may not justify the cost of a solar tracker.

If you engaged a solar professional to install your PV panels, your PV panels would already be well sited and orientated. If not, a review of your solar panel orientation can help you improve energy production.

Another way to get more electricity from your solar panels is by knowing your current shade condition. This changes, so it’ll be good for you to do an annual review. Your neighbor may have planted tall trees to use as a hedge. Or your favorite deciduous tree may have grown taller and has more branches now.

If shading occurs, the particular PV panel that is shaded may contribute to higher internal resistance for the whole system. This affect the array’s power output considerably.

Finally, in order to achieve better efficiency, you can reduce your solar panel temperature. One of the ways you can do this is through evaporative cooling.

Evaporative Cooling Methods

Evaporative cooling was used since ancient days. Egyptians hung wet mats at their doors and windows to cool the wind blowing into their homes. Throughout history, humans have attempted different ways to utilize evaporative cooling.

Today, those years of trial and error has culminated into 3 main ways of using evaporative cooling – direct evaporative cooling, indirect evaporative cooling and indirect/direct evaporative cooling.

Direct evaporative cooling involves moving warm, dry air across water. When water evaporates, the resultant energy in the air remains the same. However warm, dry air has now become cool, damp air.

Indirect evaporative cooling involves a heat exchanger so the humidity level of the air remains unchanged. Inside the heat exchanger, heat flows from the warm air to the cool air flowing inside coils of metallic tubing.

With indirect/direct methods, air is pre-cooled as it goes through a heat exchanger. Then it is cooled even more as it undergoes direct evaporative cooling. The resulting humidity in the air will not be as high as with direct evaporative cooling.

Keeping Solar Panels Cool

To cool solar panels, we will be using direct evaporative cooling. This involves the following components and materials:

1. Air blower
2. Cooler pads

If you blow cool air across your solar panels, you can take a lot of heat away. This is good. Because when solar cells are cooled, they produce more electricity.

The air blower should be installed at the bottom of the solar panel. Cooled air must be blown upwards (along the surface of your PV panels) so as to facilitate the escape of hot air as it rises.

At the air intake end, you must keep the cooler pad moist all the time. Therefore you’ll have to run a pipe to your roof and provide a consistent drip over the material.

As warm dry air moves through the damp pads, it becomes cool and wet. As it gets blown toward the surface of the PV panel, it absorbs heat and cools the solar panel. To make your solar panels cooler, blow more cool air against it so the rate of heat loss becomes greater.

Another way evaporative cooling can take place is by using a misting fan. With high pressure, water can turn into a fine mist as it goes through a very small hole. The same effect can be achieved (with far less energy) by using a simple atomizer. Small fans installed at the edge of your solar panels can transport water mist to its surface.

As tiny droplets of water evaporate, they absorb heat from the air and cool it. Since the surface area of a water mist is very large, water evaporates rapidly and lots of heat is quickly absorbed.

Evaporative cooling is most effective in hot, dry climates where water evaporates readily. During ideal conditions, evaporative cooling can bring down the air temperature by as much as about 20 degree Celsius.

A Few Considerations

In order not to block sunlight from reaching the solar cells (however little that may be), it is good to design your system to cool the underside of your PV panels, if possible. If you are using mist to cool your solar panels, droplets of water at the surface of the glass may reflect light away, reducing its effectiveness.

Water mist can be created using a piezoelectric transducer. However this would probably take up more energy than by using a simple atomizer.

With cooler solar panels, your PV panels can generate even more electricity during summer. However during winter, your cooling system gets less effective. And in order to avoid burst pipes, you must drain all water from the system.

Finally, it’ll be useful to know how much more electricity you are getting by using your PV panel cooler. This can be done by recording the power output before and after you switch on your cooling system.

Continue Reading:

1. Solar Panel Efficiency
2. Solar Panel Efficiency — How Does Dirt on Your Solar Panels Affect The Amount Of Electricity Produced?
3. How To Build A Sun Tracking Mechanism to Increase Your Solar Panel Efficiency by 40%

Some folks put their solar oven beside the barbecue pit to keep cooked food warm. You can even use it to keep your beverage hot or to toast pieces of bread. How you use it is up to your imagination.

The things you need are as follows:

1. A wooden box

2. Black construction paper

3. 4 pieces of aluminum reflectors

4. Small black stones

5. A piece of glass

We’ll start with the wooden box. First, you need to line the inside of the wooden box with black construction paper. Black color will help absorb as much heat as possible from the sun.

A Solar Oven

Then we’ll cut the aluminum reflectors to fit the length and breadth of the wooden box.

After cutting, you’ll have to use a small file or sandpaper to remove burrs from the edges. You can also round the corners so they won’t be sharp.

Next, you’ll have to attach these aluminum reflectors to the side of the box. You can do this by using small hinges or simply by screwing the aluminum to the box and bending it to the angle you want.

(The aluminum reflectors concentrate solar energy into the wooden box where food is cooked.)

As soon as this is done, you may want to cut a piece of glass that fits the top of the wooden box. Glass allows sunlight into the box. But after sunlight is converted into heat energy, it remains trapped within the box. This setup is like a greenhouse that traps heat within its interior for plants to flourish.

Finally, put the stones at the bottom of the wooden box. These stones store heat energy and they help to regulate the temperature within the box. Even after you put the solar oven in the shade, the stones will still give out heat and keep your food warm.

Notes:

• Preheating the oven takes about 15 to 30 minutes, depending on how strong the sun is. Solar cookers are best for preparing food that doesn’t require high temperature and can be cooked slowly.

• When using the solar oven, you may want to tilt it southward to catch more sunlight.

• On the inside of the solar oven, use only non-toxic material like construction paper. Black paint is effective, but most of them emit harmful elements when heated.

• If you want to make a large solar oven, you can line the bottom with dark-colored bricks. Such materials can store lots of heat energy and can withstand high temperature.

Continue Reading:

1. Pool Solar Panels
2. Home Solar Power — Different Ways of Harnessing Energy From The Sun To Reduce Energy Bills
3. 7 Different Ways of Using Solar Energy At Home and In Your Office

Building Solar Panels

If you’re interested in building solar panels, you must have retained a library of information in your head or even started your own DIY solar power project.

However I can almost guarantee you haven’t learned every trick in the book. In fact, if you read the rest of this page, you’ll discover three secrets that almost nobody knows about making solar panels…yet…

These tips are essential to help you convert more power from the sun and lower the cost of your project:

Secret #1: Use Anti-Reflective Glass

A good portion of sunlight that hits the surface of your solar panel’s glass covering gets reflected away. They never reach the solar (photovoltaic) cells. In order to generate more electricity, we need to have more sunlight penetrate the glass.

A simple method to do this is to use anti-reflective glass or use a layer of anti-reflective coating on the surface of the glass. This is proven to increase the power output of your solar panel by as much as 50%!

Secret #2: Angle Your Solar Panel

The greatest enemies of your solar power generator are leaves and debris that stays on the glass surface. This is obvious since they will prevent sunlight from reaching the solar cells. Therefore the simplest way to minimize such blockages is to angle your solar panel a little during installation. This will help them slide off the panel easily. Rainwater or snow can also move easily to the side of the panel when it hits the glass surface.

Secret #3: Join Broken Cells Together

If you are on a tight budget, you can drive down the cost of your project by joining broken solar cells together. With a little practice, you’ll get good at it. And you’ll soon wonder why aren’t more people doing this. (Perhaps it takes time…or because you need simple plans and a little effort… and… we’re lazy by nature) In fact, many suppliers will be very happy to sell you broken solar cells at unbelievable prices.

If you were to take these three tips and implement them, I assure you that your DIY solar panel will be working harder while the cost of building it becomes cheaper.

There are of course more tips than these to be learned about building DIY solar panels. So I encourage you to keep reading and learning from experienced folks who design and build for themselves solar panels that they use everyday. Some of these valuable resources can be found in magazines and on the Internet.

Continue Reading:

1. How To Build Solar Panel (Part 3 of 3)
2. Do-It-Yourself Solar Panels – Electricity Conversion From Sunlight
3. How To Find Used Solar Panels

With good foundation, you can better understand other materials (or salesmen) in the future.

First, you need to know that there are different wavelengths present in sunlight.

You can use a prism to split sunlight into various colors, which is a manifestation of its wavelengths. (Remember those science experiments?)

In some solar application, it’s the infrared component of sunlight that’s utilized. In others, only the visible light is useful. Modern engineering tries to marry different technologies to harvest as much of the (visible and invisible) spectrum as possible to enhance solar panel efficiency.

Second, you need to know how sunlight interacts with matter.

Sunlight can be absorbed, transmitted, scattered or reflected. It is the material’s property that determines how light behaves.

When light is absorbed, its energy is transformed into heat. In some cases, it is changed into electricity. All solar energy systems depend on this property — absorption.

When light is transmitted, very little energy is lost. It simply goes through the material with very little attenuation.

Scattering occurs when light interacts with molecules. Light radiates in many different directions with different intensity in such cases.

Reflection occurs when light is bounced back. Shiny, smooth surfaces are better reflectors than dark, matte surfaces.

There are no perfect materials. Thus there is no such thing as a perfect conductor or a perfect absorber. An index is always used (in physics) to identify how well each material conducts or absorbs light.

If you are interested in solar water heaters, you must also know how heat interacts with matter.

Some materials can conduct heat pretty well while a few others restricts the flow of heat. Solar heaters make use of materials that can absorb solar radiation well. They trap solar energy and turn it into heat.

Once this is done, other materials are used to conduct and distribute heat so it can be used to warm up water (or air). In order to keep heat from escaping, a heat insulator must be used.

Putting these materials together, we can create a phenomenon known as the greenhouse effect. Glass is a good material for this purpose. It can transmit light pretty well and is also a good insulator of heat.

This is why your car, when parked under the sun for a while, can get so hot inside.

If you are interested in generating electricity, you must know about photovoltaic cells. They are commonly known as solar cells. They absorb sunlight to produce electricity.

Common PV cells consist of two layers of thin semiconductor sandwiched together. They are made of highly purified silicon. These are the same material found in transistors and microchips.

This construction forms millions of p-n junctions that can generate electricity when exposed to light. When photons (sunlight) hit each p-n junction, their energy is absorbed. This cause electrons to break free from its orbit.

Free-moving electrons are made to flow in a particular direction under the influence of an electric field. Such electron movement produces electricity.

If you need to know more about solar energy, solar panels and energy conservation, more information is available as you browse through the categories on the right.

Continue Reading:

1. Pool Solar Panels
2. What Are Solar Heaters, How They Work And What They Are Used For
3. Important Facts And Properties of A Solar (PV) Panel You Must Know About (Part 1 of 3)

You can try spraying water on your solar panels to cool it down. While doing so, you can notice a significant difference in power output on your meter.

Some people observe a 5% increase in efficiency while others notice a significant 12% difference.

Many people have thought about how to lower the temperature of their solar panel to improve its efficiency.

Although there isn’t a straightforward method to achieve this, simple ideas exists and you can try implementing them.

I’ve listed some common ones over here for your reference:

1. Using evaporative cooling

When water evaporates, heat is taken away. This results in a lower temperature. (This is why water is cooler than ambient air temperature.) Using this property, we can spray a film of water on the surface of your solar panel to cool it down.

Since solar panels are weather proof, water seep into the interior of the solar panel frame. As water flows over the PV panel surface, the glass heats it up. Because of this, the rate of evaporation increases. Thus more cooling takes place.

Water flowing over the glass surface is continuous yet limited. Light does not have to pass through a volume of water before reaching the photovoltaic semiconductor. Therefore there is very little solar energy attenuation.

However if you want to use water from your domestic supply, it takes energy to pump water to your roof. Also, if your water is hard, it may leave deposit on the panel surface after a while. This blocks off sunlight and reduces the efficiency.

In order to circumvent these problems, you can circulate the water rather than letting it drain away. You won’t have to keep pumping water to your roof. You can also control the hardness of water flowing over your solar panels to avoid deposits.

Note: You have to ensure there is sufficient structural support to hold this volume of water

2. Using heat pipes

You can use heat pipes to bring heat away from your PV panels. You can also use the heat to warm up your water supply or even your bedroom.

A Heatpipe

Heat pipes work very efficiently. At the hot interface, a liquid turns into vapor by absorbing heat from that surface. The vapor then condenses back into liquid at the cold end, releasing latent heat. The liquid returns to the hot interface through capillary action or gravity.

This cycle repeats itself continuously to transport heat from the hot end to the cool end.

Even though heat pipes are quite efficient, they are not cheap. However the price of heat pipes may be covered by the increase in solar panel efficiency over many years.

Also, if you are using heat from solar panels to contribute to your overall home heating plan, you can save a little more in energy costs.

3. Having at least 6 inches of clearance between your roof and solar panel

Proper spacing between your roof and solar panel will promote good convection cooling. Air that is heated up underneath your solar panels can escape quickly by rising to the top.

Cool air is then introduced as hot air leaves. In this way, excess heat is transported away, thus cooling your solar panels.

Continue Reading:

1. 7 Different Ways of Using Solar Energy At Home and In Your Office
2. Creating An Energy Efficient House – A Primer On Why You Should Do It and How
3. How Do You Know If Solar Panels Are Suitable For Your Property?