Forever Greenable world

Several years ago I bought some remote property in Arizona. I am an astronomer and wanted a place to practice my hobby far away from the sky-wrecking light pollution found near cities of any real size. I found a great piece of property. The problem is, it's so remote that there is no electric service available. That's not really a problem. No electricity equals no light pollution. However, it would be nice to have at least a little electricity, since so much of life in the 21st century is dependant on it.

I built a wind turbine to provide some power on the remote property. It works great, when the wind blows. However, I wanted more power, and more dependable power. The wind seems to blow all the time on my property, except when I really need it too. I do get well over 300 sunny days a year on the property though, so solar power seems like the obvious choice to supplement the wind turbine. Solar panels are very expensive though. So I decided to try my hand at building my own. I used common tools and inexpensive and easy to acquire materials to produce a solar panel that rivals commercial panels in power production, but completely blows them away in price. Read on for step by step instructions on how I did it.

Let me state up front that I probably won't be able to help you out much if you decide to build your own solar panel(s). This web site has become insanely popular, often taxing the bandwidth limits of the server. I get dozens of requests for help each day. I simply don't have time to answer the majority of them. Most of the questions and requests I get are the same ones over and over again. I have crated a FAQ to handle these repetitive questions. Please read it before emailing me. Simple questions, not covered by the FAQ,which only require a quick and simple answer may get replies if time permits. However, there is no way I can help you out with complex issues, teach you electronics theory, help you locate parts, build a charge controller for you, or custom design a system for you. There just aren't enough hours in the day. Sorry.

So what is a solar panel anyway? It is basically a box that holds an array of solar cells. Solar cells are the things that do the actual work of turning sunlight into electricity. However, it takes a lot of cells to make a meaningful amount of power, and they are very fragile, so the individual cells are assembled into panels. The panels hold enough cells to make a useful amount of power and protect the cells from the elements. It doesn't sound too complicated. I was convinced I could do it myself.

I started out the way I start every project, by Googling for information on home-built solar panels. I was shocked at how few I found. The fact that very few people were building their own panels led me to think it must be harder to do than I thought. The project got shelved for a while, but I never stopped thinking about it.

After a while, I came to some conclusions:

• The main stumbling block to building solar panels is acquiring solar cells at a reasonable price.

• New solar cells are very expensive, and can even sometimes be hard to find in quantity at any price.

• Blemished and damaged solar cells are available on Ebay Ebay and other places at a fraction of the cost of new perfect cells.

• These second rate solar cells could probably be used to make a solar panel that would work just fine.

Once I came to the realization that I could use blemished and factory-second solar cells to build my panels, I finally got to work. I started by buying some solar cells off of Ebay Ebay.