Well, making a homemade solar panel is not that hard. It also has little to no cost, and anyone can easily do it. What we are talking about are panels, that produce electricity, not the ones that heat water. Keep reading to find out more.
There are several types of solar panels. The first one, which you have probably constructed in grade school, or at home as an experiment is the copper oxide one. Those panels do work, but they are highly non-efficient, and so to power something with them would take many square meters. So, that’s not what we want.
How to make a homemade solar panel – the basic info
The panel that we are going to construct is one based on a semiconductor. Copper oxide also is a semiconductor, but it is not a suitable one for building solar panels. We need to have a top layer, which is made of glass, and uses very simple technology to make the glass conductive. In the middle layer we are going to use the semiconductor, which is very easy to obtain. In the bottom layer we will have a sheet of metal, or any plastic sheet covered in aluminum foil, or the same type of glass used on top. It doesn’t make a difference. With a 10×10 inch panel we will be able to power a laptop computer in bright daylight, and be able to power some other cool stuff.
If you want to make a home power system out of those panels, you need larger surface area and something to store the energy in, because at nighttime, the panels do not produce any electricity. That’s a bit more complex, but it can still be done fairly easily!
Here’s the easiest way to quickly construct solar panels at home: http://www.squidoo.com/solarp
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