Homemade Solar Panel

I haven’t posted in a while, mainly because I’ve been off building a new Hydrogen Fuel Cell and messing around with a whole different area of alternative energy – solar power.

The idea of solar power – harnessing the suns energy for electrical purposes – has been around for years and can be very useful to us humans, however solar panels come with a hefty price tag so in the short term the savings on our energy bills wont offset the initial, rather large, investment!

So my blog, so far, has been all about building your own hydrogen generator to save money and fuel in your vehicle. Now that’s all very well but at the end of the day we spend more time at home than we do in our cars (unless you live in a motorhome that is!) so you’re going to be using more fuel at home than on the road.

The annual fuel bill to run my home far outweighs the cost of running my van and having saved roughly 40% on my diesel costs, I’ve now started looking at ways to slash that household bill once and for all!

I’m not one for going out and buying ready made stuff when the same stuff can be easily made at home – it’s like buying a sandwich when you could easily make one yourself for a third of the price and it would probably taste better as well!

Say hello to my HOME MADE SOLAR PANEL:

Now it’s pretty basic – I know – but this is just a test to make sure I’m on the right road before I go out and start making one that’s going to have enough power to run something.

As you can see – the cell is in the sun and is producing roughly 33microamps of power, which isn’t much but it’s a start! Sometimes, depending on the intensity of the sun it goes right up to 50microamps.

Just as a comparison here is the same cell in the shade:

The reading is around 6microamps – the solar cell is actually a battery so it will always be producing some current regardless of whether there is any sunshine on it.

It was really easy to make this basic cell and I’m really happy with the results. It’s basically made up of copper which is heated to get down to the red cuprious oxide layer which is the stuff we need to make the solar cell.

I’ll be posting updated pictures of my solar cells and letting you in on how my experiments are going!

I’m even going to try and hybrid my hydrogen fuel cell with the solar panel (when it’s finished) and maybe even a wind turbine to make the fuel cell run on it’s own and not from the car battery. This would then make the fuel savings that I get from having the hydrogen generator fitted completely free! Which can only be a good thing!

If you want to start making your own solar cells and wind turbines (I haven’t started my wind turbine yet) then check out Earth4Energy - it’s the book and video product I purchased which shows you exactly how you can make your own solar panels and turbines.

Obviously they aren’t all going to look like the very basic cell which we have above and I hope to have my home, partly, running on solar and wind power pretty damn soon!

I didn’t want to spend $1000’s purchasing solar panels or windmills so building my own professional system

for under $200 seemed pretty reasonable to me!

Especially seeing as I could be well on my way to slashing $100’s off my energy bill each year!

Anyway check out Earth4Energy and see what you think!

It might not be for you but it’s been really helpful so far for me and my new green living approach!

Thanks for reading and check out Earth4Energy now!

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