Does anyone have any experience in solar panel installation and/or making them? From what I've read there's DIY kits to make solar panels from basically scratch but there are none available in my country. Seeing how the government cucks us into paying THEM if we install solar panels it's completely moronic. I wanted to make some panels of my own and connect them to the electricity of the house after popping them on the roof. Anyone with similar experiences/advice?
You find a warehouse and buy them like a normal DIY person. Typical cost of a 350w panel is like $60-80 new. Used 250w panels for maybe $40, at most.
Otherwise get a generator, microhydro or some other means of producing power. Or move.
Moving isn't exactly an option and solar panels aren't all that popular in this shithole of a country, so even if someone has solar panels they're barely used, none for sale that would be used and cheaper
How do you find places that sell panels at these prices?
FACEBOOK diy solar groups. diysolarforum. (prowse's). Basically E-word-of-mouth.
There's a guy out of a knoxville, TN warehouse that has good reports from peeps who have bought from him. He's on FBM. Probably the furthest north dude w reasonable prices. Furthest I've found. TN has a lot of new homesteaders going off-grid.
Other than that, Santan Solar has warehouses in arizona and georgia, can ship LTL (but that brings the price up..). Sometimes Signature Solar out of Brashear TX has good deals on pallets.
You start to get good prices, if shipping, when buying a whole pallet at a time. Generally the warehouse should cut you a deal, too, when showing up with your own truck to buy quantity.
If you're in an area with no solar, you'll have to have a pallet shipped LTL, then sell off panels you don't need to the locals to make your money back. At least, it can cover your shipping cost. All the warehouses are in the south where it's sunny. If you have no sun then wtf are you trying to put solar in? Overcast days produce 10% or less of the panel's rating.
NEVER buy any panel without seeing the label on the back. Santan is maybe the exception to that. I'm talking from unknown sellers. You not only want to see the front, you want to see the condition of the back, and the full label. It has all the specs. Don't say 'i bought a 100 watt panel' and just show the front of it, you'll look moronic. Post the specs label from the back.
And don't buy dinky-ass 100w panels - not anything but pallets of residential. That's the best price-per-watt.
>Does anyone have any experience in solar panel installation and/or making them?
No I don't.
Thanks! Neither do I! 🙂
I have never heard of diy making solar panels from scratch. Dont they require some rare earth minerals and industrial processes to manufacture?But the way i see it is if the poor people in gaza can source them i would think anyone would be able to get their hands on them somehow. I live in usa and bought some off of a private seller on ebay. The governmwnt was not involved in any way. I would not want them to be involved either. I did not grid connect them either. Instead i isolated some critical circuits in my house such as fridge, water pump, and lights and routed them to a panel thats fed only by inverters which are fed by batteries and solar panels. This way if there is a power outage then it will not affect those critical things that need to stay running
If for some reason you can't buy any of the $100 450W panels that are globally available, you can still import them directly from China for maybe 3-4x the price, which is still orders of magnitude better than trying to build panels from scratch. Yet worse, but cheaper is buying solar cells from China for about $100/200W and assembling panels from those. If your country is not part of globohomosexual trade and you can't even import chinkshit, you have no chance of getting anywhere with PrepHole power.
>anyone
Yes, surely.
i dont think it'll work but you may try to heat water with solar heaters and hope some form of condensation takes place. let the "vapor" rise and then flow back down a turbine to create electricity? would only work in summer i guess and would be extremely inefficient, if it works at all.
depending on what you want to do/how much electricity you want to generate you might buy some small factor panels made to charge phones
I've made some solar panels many years ago by soldering cells together into strings and then mounting them onto salvaged glass panes. In short, it pretty much sucked but it did work.
I wouldn't even consider it in modern times because of how cheap commercial solar panels have become compared to in the 1990's.
I've still got like a mile of tabbing wire and a few thousand watts worth of the cells/wafers that I would be happy to give you if you want to try your hand, but it truly is a fools errand at this point.
The panels aren’t the expensive part, and installing them is fairly easy (granted I have not installed them, but I applied a few years back to several start ups and they were willing to hire anyone who wasn’t a meth head, had basic tools, and wasn’t afraid to climb), but if you can mount a satellite dish or a tv you can probably mount those panels no prob.