Build Your own Solar Panel!

Hi there,

My name is Austin. If you are here, you're probably looking for the easiest and fool-proof way of building a solar panel on your own. You're perhaps a proponent of Green energy, or a DIY enthusiast or both of these, like me. I'd love to share with you my experience of creating solar power by my own.

It was one of those afternoons I was setting up a garden in my terrace, having a casual chat with my 14 year old son. As our conversation drifted towards his studies, he asked me if it was possible to generate power from sun, wind and water. He told me there was a guest lecture in his classroom where a local green peace volunteer explained the possibilities of using alternate energy. I explained him a bit further on the current crisis on global warming and encouraged him to research further on alternate sources of energy. Specifically, I explained him the application of Solar Power since I was familiar with it as I had lived for a couple years in a home in Arizona that employed Solar Water Heaters.

After our conversation, it occurred to me that perhaps it could be a cool DIY project to do - to build solar panels to generate electricity. Apart from being a great DIY project, I thought it'd also be a great way to reduce my carbon footprint. (And that is how I got myself involved with Solar Panels, and Solar Power in general)

I did not know where to start, since my knowledge about Solar Panels was very minimal then. I started my search with Google and found out some good information about how to build your own solar panels. There were a few websites where people had shared how they had built their own panels. But that was not enough for me to get started because not all information pertaining to making solar panels like sourcing raw materials, cost, step-by-step methodology, capacity and other relevant details were not present in one single place. I spent about 2 weeks and collected information across from various websites and tried to put them together to arrive at a logical step by step process to build solar panels. However, many questions still remained:

• Where do I find the best PV Cells? (Solar cells or PV cells are the fundamental units that produce electricity)
  
• Do I have to necessarily buy new PV cells or is there a cheaper way to procure them?
  
• How many cells would I need, for example, to build a panel that can power my refrigerator?
• Is it possible to power my home with Solar Panels? Is it legal?