JOOI, has anyone ever managed to homebrew a PV panel? I was just musing over commercial panel cost and poor ROI, and wondering if anyone had cooked up their own (doubtless at much-reduced efficiency compared to commercial ones!) - there's quite a bit of stuff out there about homebrew solar setups for water heating, and homebrew wind turbines, but I've never seen the same for PV.
Maybe it just can't be done using materials and facilities readily available to the DIYer?
cheers
Jules
How's your back yard semiconductor fabrication going? :-)
The only real potential for DIY is taking the electrical elements and sticking them in your own enclosure, and I can't see there being much point in doing that - I'd guess having the elements built into panels is the cheapest way to get them.
Ie yes, whereas water heating is just plumbing, and homebrew wind turbines are just metalwork + an alternator, PV is really hard.
A quick look in wikipedia
Whilst you could probably make a solar cell of some sort at home, unless you've got access to some fancy facilities, I think you'd struggle to make something useful in terms of power generation.
Look on eBay and search for "broken solar wafer".
At those prices you may as well buy whole unbroken panels.
The only way PV makes any financial sense is if you have an installation that qualifies for Feed In Tariff payments....but you would not get that certified with homebrew hardware
And building your own control electronics, sun tracking, focussing, cooling. There's a LOT more to a proper PV installation than a few panels powering a fishpond pump.
MBQ
Precisely.
You need silicon chips of substantial are produced to very high specs.
Or a lot of old weston exposure meters connected in series :-)
Crude photoelectrical stuff is almost useless. You may get volts, not no amps at all.
Its like saying 'lets make a rectifier out of a broom handle and some corroded copper wire - yes it works sort of, but no, its not efficient.
Even a water solar panel is beyond most DIY skills. You have to start with copper pipe or a radiator or something.
You have a better chance of erection a post type windmill frankly, with sailcloth blades.
I believe those can do about one donkey power. And did in fact replace treadmill donkeys, when it was realised that they ate less of the grain than the donkey did. The miller pocketing the difference useually. Nothing changes in business.
So much for sustainable energy.
The only way it makes financial sense is if you are selling rubbish to unsuspecting punters.
Even FIT doesn't make PV worth having
PV makes financial sense if you dont have a mains connection, if you're in a remote location, or for a shed in the garden to save on armoured cable etc.
FIT *might* save money int he long term, depends.
[g]
Pls explain....
£8k in a NS&I ISA gets you 2.5% tax free £8k attached to your roof in the form of a well sited 2KWp PV installation gets you a yield of £800 tax free adding together FiT, Deemed Export and usage reduction, index linked for 25 years.What would you do with £8k if it was spare?
Until the Government abolishes it.
You can't do it economically, because the regulatory and large-scale financial aspects needed to qualify for FIT and also to get a failure warranty on this large investment are a problem. You can't do it from surplus either, because it's a developing technology and it's more cost effective to buy new-tech than to use old bargain tech.
OTOH, if you're talking about lighting an isolated shed, then fill your boots. Whatever scrappies and eBay can provide, along with some old double glazing panels, recycled UPS batteries, LED floodlights and minimal electronics will see you up and running for a few tenners and a weekend with the heatshrink and silicone.
Given their past behaviour over the last few years, watch out for some excellent end of Summer deals from Maplin. They've been known to nearly give the stuff away.
Indeed - but I wondered if there was a "poor man's" way of doing a similar job at fractions of the output*. I think the only thing that turned up the last time I googled this was someone's DIY project using (I think) boron - I think they were making use of some readily-available household product as a source. It worked, but wasn't exactly scalable.
cheers
Jules
FIT is such a pork-barrel that it might just achieve it - provided that you have the capital and nothing better to invest it in. Check the numbers carefully.
Yeah, that was why I was wondering whether some homebrew technique existed - something lower-output / larger-footprint, but that was a darn sight cheaper to build vs. buying a commercial solution. From posts so far it sounds like the answer is no ;-)
cheers
Jules
There was an excellent Feed in Tariff fraud in Spain, where a solar energy facility was rumbled apparently generating by night.
They connected huge diesel generator sets to increase their "qualifying" energy export.
Link here:
There are times that efficiency isn't the driving factor, not for DIY stuff - something that does an intended job well enough and can compete on cost grounds can often be better. The key there being "well enough" of course, and it sounds like PV-at-home just isn't viable.
Yeah, I did a bit of messing with that this summer to see if it'd be useful for the workshop. Temperature gains in reasonable sunlight were actually quite impressive, but to scale it up to something that supplied enough water to do more than just wash my hands once in a while would have needed quite large amounts of pipework. Unless the needed pipe just happens to fall in my lap, it's more profitable to just "waste" time by going somewhere that has hot running water when I need it :-)
In a lot of cases I think it can work economically for a resourceful individual - it just doesn't scale at all, and the level of effort needed to get anywhere is considerable.
cheers
Jules
If I grow a vegetable patch of potatoes and hammer in small bits of copper and zinc electrodes on each, can I connect these in series on a living plant and eventually run my house on that?
e.g.
You might as well build a treadmill for the pet rat, and use that to charge some batteries.
Best bet is a solar furnace coupled to a boiler and a Mamod steam engine driving a bicycle alternator. .
Easiest way to do this is simply to team up with a neighbour, fit panels to one roof, string a cable across to the other, and drive the feed in tariff direct from the neighbours mains, using a masterfully planned schedule that corresponds with the primary panel output So buy electricity from neighbour at 7p straight off Sizewell B and sell it to grid at 44p. Simples!
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.