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Building Your Own Solar Panel In the Garage
jeroen8 writes "A Dutch guy was able to build his own solar panel in his garage using materials that were a third as expensive as the mass produced solar panels currently available on the European market. He bought his solar cells on eBay and used them to create his own panel. His output price is only 1.20 Euro per Watt Peak (Wp). This makes you wonder if we are paying too much for mass-produced solar panels, which should, in theory, be a lot less expensive than something you create in your garage."
If they aren't brand new the reason why it's cheaper is because someone else has paid for much of it.
Only cheaper if your time is worth nothing. Still, very cool. But not particularly novel or groundbreaking.
I don't think it's that uncommon for used goods to cost less than new goods.
Wow you mean to tell me if I buy factory defect products that carry no warranty on ebay I can save money!? I never knew! It seems as if the Dutch have found the secret to inexpensive solar power: Factories should ONLY produce bent and dent cells!
I would've built it outside, but to each his own.
The main costs in solar array manufacturing are manpower, raw structural materials, and the solar cells. Remember that the prices for single solar cells are fairly constant, given that they're mass produced already. Same for the structural materials. That leaves (Cells + Materials) on the hobbyist's side and (Cells + Materials + Labour) on the mass production side. It's not surprising that a hobbyist can construct a panel for a competitive price if he doesn't count his time as a cost.
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The author bought damaged solar cells from eBay, selected the good ones, then soldered those together. Then he jury-rigged his own waterproof casing and electrical connections. Used goods are cheaper but that does not mean new ones are over-priced.
Let us know how long his cells last outside before insinuating all the solar cell producers in the world are selling overpriced gear.
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...but you've only paid for the parts, not the labor or the engineering or the rent etc.
The point that the packaging of solar panels is expensive is not lost on me. There's a local firm (Tucson) making thin-film cells which ought to be packaged as plastic-laminated roof shingles to keep the final cost down.
But I admire his fortitude in building a panel. I have a stack of cells in my workshop that I don't see how I'll ever turn into a panel, since it requires lots of glass and care and sticky tape.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Panels today have a usable lifespan of over 25 years.
They have the proper connectors, and the appropriate gauge wire. They can handle 50mph hailstones and 90mph wind, and they're all UL listed. They're warranteed, usually for 20+ years. Some are hybrid (sandwiching amorphous Si and crystalline Si), which gather more light and produces more power per sq foot, something that can't currently be made in the garage.
Purchased panels also cost about 3x the price of doing it yourself (maybe $4-6 /watt). However, I would strongly bet that the overall cost of ownership will be higher for DIY folks, who can't compete with the quality of fully-assembled panels. They will have to make their own mountable panels, and doing that right will not be cheap. They will have to be able to handle high winds and weather, too. And the UL listing will also mean that you can be grid-tied, since the utility companies won't allow you to connect non-UL-listed generating stations to the grid.
Some cool things you can do with DIY panels is get exactly the shape you want. You can also add more bypass diodes to handle partial shading better. One of the biggest issues with PV panels is the significant drop in output with only minor amounts of shade.... A single leaf stuck over part of a cell can reduce the panel's output by 25%. But if you DIY, you can put many more bypass diodes into it, causing a much smaller fraction lost. You can even mount it on some sort of heat sink or antifreeze-filled copper plating to get better performance (PV cells work better when cool.)
It's a cool project. But if you're trying to save money over the long term, DIY is probably not the way to go.
So if a production one costs 10 dollars, 3 time 10 is $30,
Then, because its less, we have to subtract his costs of $30 from the production cost of $10, it costs him minus 20 dollars to build each one?
You mean it was 1/3 the cost of a production unit.
There is no such thing as "3 times less" of anything.
So, you're saying that "3 times less" means you get "3 times" and then subtract it. By that logic, "3 times more" would mean you get "3 times" and then add it. So, "3 times more" than $10 would be $40.
This alone should be enough to make you realise that your usage of the terminology is idiosyncratic. In normal English, "3 times more" means you multiple by 3, and "3 times less" means you divide by 3. It is totally unambiguous. It may be colloquial English usage, but it is not incorrect.
I am fairly (95%) certain that these Cells have been stolen, probably by a person working at a solar cell manufacturing plant.
Getting an 'uncounted' batch of 'mixed quality' just screams 'stolen'.. and then the price itself is also cheaper then the raw manufacturing
But they are 'new', extracting Cells from used panels is not cost effective as commercial panels are laminated and string soldered which is very hard to take apart without breaking most of the cells.
Also, when you buy good quality Solar Panels you usually get around 25 years of warranty and the knowledge that they have been throughly safety tested (and designed) so that they won't burn down your house when one cell short circuits or your getting a bit more sun then imagined. I would think that's worth something by itself.
Maybe you could try learning some English?
Yes it's a phase not liked by some people, but it's been used for hundreds of years and anyone who isn't being an idiot understands what it means.
Google actually has the Merriam-Webster's dictionary of English usage half page on it:
http://books.google.com/books?id=2yJusP0vrdgC&pg=PA908
They are slightly more polite than me, but you can feel the "those commentators are idiots" between the lines...
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The panel in the article produced 17 Watts, for a panel size of about 1m x 0.5m (approximated from photo with mobile phone in it). A quick google reveals a 43W polycrystalline panel of similar size for about 300 euros (about 7euros/watt peak)
A picture is worth exactly 1024 words.
Or a lack of market, it's the same as any new(ish) product really, cars 120 years ago were expensive because they were all low-production, then mass manufacturing came in, prices dropped because they were suddenly everywhere, but the newest of the new was always 10x the price of the basic ones... computers, same thing 80 years ago, expensive as hell, because they were all custom, companies may have only made 3 of them a year, now they make thousands a year because there is a market for them, drives down the price, but the newest of the new is still 10x more than the basic...
You can go down to Radio Shack (if they still existed) and buy a bunch of little cells for a couple dollars, because they are everywhere, there's probably like 3 or 4 of them in your house right now, calculator, weatherproof radio, battery recharger, etc... you can buy those for like 50 cents a piece, but they are useless to power your house, you'd have to cover your entire roof, garage, and neighbours house with them for it to work.
Once the company (or people in general) realizes there is a market/use for them, they'll spend the time + money to establish a facility to build them in bulk, with 100 machines, instead of just the 3 machines they are using now, this demand drives down the prices of the materials they need to build them, which drives down the prices of mining the materials, they figure out better/quicker packaging, they establish stable shipping routes, etc etc etc... the faster it's going, the less force needed to keep it there, like pushing someone on a swing, first few pushes are hard, once they are swinging, you can keep them swinging with a pinky push...
The story is about the Europe where governments subsidise the solar panel use by giving enormous tax cuts to the buyers of solar panels and even going as far as providing 0-interest credits.
This insane amount of state intervention spawns corruption in the production and supply of the solar panels, which explains such high prices.
The summary is bad.
1. He bought damaged solar cells from a one-time vendor. There isn't a supply of them for anyone to make. They might have been stolen, they might have been a shipping write-off, whatever. They aren't new solar cells.
2. He scrounged materials, like glass, for free. Manufacturers can't do that. Most people don't have that opportunity.
3. He used wire that he "happened to have" (quoting the article). He bought it at some point, or found it. Again, not something you or I could normally do.
And so forth. Comparing the cost of doing something this way to buying a new cell is invalid and misleading. The summary is bad. And the Slashdot editors are responsible for validating and endorsing the summary, suggesting that they were asleep at the wheel.
Sheesh, can't we get some decent editing here? Has the entire field of news reporting gone to the dogs?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Right, he complained about the cost of the glass the panel manufacturer's use, then he uses cheap window glass pulled out of a trash heap. It's not tempered. It's not anti-reflective. It's not matched to the absorption spectrum of the cells...
There's nothing to see here. Let me know when someone figures out how to make the cells, cheap, in their garage workshop.
Power density costs money, but is it necessary? Maybe his panels do get only 25% the watts per square meter as an expensive panel. But they get something like 3x the watts per dollar. To get the same wattage, you do need 4x the area with his cheap panels. But since solar power in the Netherlands is about 100W:m^2 average across the year, a 1KW home gets in 10m^2 sunlight its consumption (before cell inefficiency, and using inefficient storage/retrieval HW). If he's actually getting 62W:m^2, he needs 16.2m^2. If that gets averaged by day/night, and is close to the average daylight (he posted 2 days before the equinox), and accounts for weather, then maybe he needs 200m^2 (that's 5% averaged annual efficiency). That's only 14x14m, about the size of a home that consumes 1KW.
When roof space costs more than these cheap cells save, they're worth the higher cost. Or if the generated power can be sold back to the grid, then the higher density can be worth the higher cost (especially over time). But sometimes, cheap low density can be worth it. Which is why dye sensitized and other cheap, (relatively) inefficient generating materials are interesting. If they can generate power long enough to pay for themselves (including their lifecycle energy cost), they can make "hay" while the Sun shines, even as we make more dense cells become cheaper.
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