Build Your Own Solar Panel

Posts Tagged ‘solar panels’

If you are looking for solar panels for sale online, you have a lot to look at. Prices range from over $30,000 for a pallet of Sanyo 200 Watt solar panels all the way down to $19.50 for a kinda bad looking solar panel on eBay. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, there may be something that suits your requirements and your budget. If you are planning to build your own solar panels, a set of 150 solar cells might sound appealing. Some come with conductive tabs attached and some do not.

The disadvantage of buying solar panels for sale online is that you cannot verify that they work. There might be some local sources for new and used solar panels in your area. Government surplus auctions, craigslist and local classified ads are all good places to start looking. Purchasing or borrowing an appropriate volt/amp meter before personally inspecting prospective purchases is a must. Be sure to set the meter to the expected output range before attaching it to a solar panel that is in full sun. More on how to find solar panels for sale ...

I play devil’s advocate sometimes and search for negative press about solar panels.  It’s not something you see every day.

Today there was a Beltway blogger claiming that some photo-voltaic solar panels that appeared in a photo-op with Barack Obama will take 110 YEARS to pay for themselves.  He is basing this on one quote from a civil servant and the estimate was related to a purchasing option that did not happen.  There is not enough public information for me to try to come to an independent estimate of the payback time for that particular installation. More on solar panel payback time ...

Back when I was a kid in school (the mid 80s) they were introducing us to something strange and new. If I asked my kids to guess what that was, they would probably say the wheel. They would be wrong, it was the computer. More about the solar generation...