Building Solar Panels and Reduce Your Electric Bills

Every homeowner has moments, usually after writing a check to pay the monthly electric bill, when he or she envisions building a solar panel system and being completely free from dependency of the local power company, and generating all the home's electrical power needs from an array of solar panels mounted on the roof or constructed in the back yard. It can be done.

You may be able to build your own solar panels and use them to lower your monthly electric bill. With a little effort and some smart shopping, you can save from $10 to $20 each month - forever! That's up to $240, enough to do your Christmas shopping with.

There are several ways that you can go about building solar panels. One way that is simple, foolproof, fast, and guaranteed, is to hire an expert contractor to supply and install the solar panels. Unfortunately, despite all the positive benefits realized when using this method, the total cost of the installation will be quite high, in many cases prohibitive for the average homeowner. There is a much less expensive way of building solar panels and installing them. Do it yourself.

Solar cells need not be new and in perfect shape to effectively provide electrical power. Some broken or chipped solar cells can be used successfully to create a system that will produce electricity. All it takes is a little know-how, some free time, and some simple straightforward electrical wiring. By connecting a few solar panels together you can create a system that will produce enough power to charge storage batteries that can run one or two of your home appliances.

Some pundits will suggest that by building a solar panel power system using damaged cells, you might be able to generate enough power to sell back into the electric grid. That's highly unlikely given the size of the system that would be required. The objective here is not to get rich, but to build a source of power at minimal cost to permanently reduce your consumption of power from the local power company. Even if you save only ten or twenty dollars each month, over time that money can accumulate into serious savings that can be used for other more personally satisfying things that electrical power.

When using damaged solar panels, the intention is to use the wiring from the damaged cell and to groups them together with other cells of similar size. You use a voltmeter to determine the cells output. When combining solar panels, it's important to understand that the combination of cells will produce a voltage that is the same as the cell with the lowest power output. In other words, if you combined a cell with an output of 75 millivolts with one with a 250 millivolt output, the combination would have an output of 75 millivolts.

Once you have wired up your array of cells, you must connect them to a power bus. When all connections are completed, mount the cells on a wooden base frame, and cover the cells with clear Plexiglas to seal the assembly. By connecting several of these self-made panels you can effectively increase the power output that is stored in your system's batteries.

To provide effective control and protection to your homemade system, you should include a charge controller to prevent overcharging the battery, a diode to prevent reverse current flow, and a power inverter to convert the DC power stored in the battery to AC power for running equipment in your home.

These damaged cells are readily available and inexpensive. After all - they're broken. Check with your state's surplus goods agency or with the highway department. The do-it-yourself method of building solar panels with broken cells may not be the answer for your particular situation, but it is a feasible way to generate solar power with minimal startup costs.

Sure, new cells would provide more output, but that has to be balanced against your budgetary limits. Using damaged cells could be the difference between having a working system or no system at all.