Dienhart.com

We have a real and growing problem. Our natural resource dependency for energy and its limited capacity and effect on the environment. Fortunately, we do have options. Some may argue that they are too expensive, that they are too inefficient, or that they are too complex, and they may be right to some extent, so I decided to find out for myself by building an alternative energy device of my own as a learning experiment. I started by doing some research on alternate energy, also knows as Green Energy. There are a number of solutions out there, but the two solutions that I found the most information on covered wind and solar power. Being that my background is in electronic engineering, I opted to further my research into solar, so that I would not need to work with moving parts and all of the complexities that I imagined could come with it. What I am going to share with you tonight is my adventure in building my own solar panels.

Now that I decided that I was going to delve into solar I had to figure out a lot of details.

• Enclosure to house the Cells
• Solar Cells to connect together to create a solar panel
• Energy Output to make sure I have enough power to operate devices connected to it.
• Voltage Output: Most systems either operates on 12v or 24v
• DC to AC converter, also known as an inverter: Since we live in an AC world in our houses, I needed to be able toconvert the DC power to AC so that standard household devices could be connected to it.
• Battery Storage: If I don’t want to be limited to only having power during the day, I had to have some method to store any excess energy.
• Charge Controllers: In order to make sure my batteries don’t get damaged due to overcharging, I had to have a charge controller.

By this time I had already found some wooden enclosures that others had built, so I had a pretty good idea of how I was going to go about building a panel. I also found schematics for charging circuits and the DC to AC converter.

A lot of do it yourselfer’s recommended going to Ebay for the parts, so taking their advice, I did. Now I did have a couple of requirements, I didn’t want this project to cost me a lot of money, and I wanted to be able to repeat the process again, so I did not want to buy from anyone that had one-off parts. I found a good supplier that was a reputable company that also happened to sell solar cells on Ebay. I figured I could build two panels that would generate enough electricity to charge a 24v bank of batteries salvaged from an electric scooter.

Once I got all of the parts in, my son and I took a quick trip to Lowes to pick up the wood and rest of the parts to build the enclosure. We actually measured and cut everything out fairly quickly, the most lengthy part of the whole process for was waiting for the primer/paint to dry.

While waiting for that to finish, I started soldering the individual cells together to form a panel. This process had it’s own challenges, as the cells are paper-thin and are extremely fragile. In fact, they are so fragile that I broke one while removing it from the box. Another challenge I quickly discovered was that the cells were very heat sensitive so I had to be careful not to damage them while soldering. I quickly overcame these challenges and assembled the Array to make a panel and covered it with a piece of acrylic to protect the cells from damage.

The first panel took roughly 10 hours to build while I worked through details and overcame challenges. I documented everything, dimensions; parts list… so that I could easily repeat the process. The second panel took roughly 5 hours to build.

So far, I’ve connected a 12v fan to the panel while outdoors to provide some circulation while on my patio. Once I get the charging circuit completed, which I plan to work on next weekend, I’ll have a much wider range of devices, which I can power. I did some testing this weekend and left the panel’s outdoors all day to see how they would do. They did fog up with condensation on the inside, which I have attributed to my assembling them in my basement, which has higher humidity. I removed the acrylic front and plan to leave it in direct sunlight for a few hours next weekend prior to reassembling.

Overall, I feel that this was a successful experiment. I learned a lot about how solar power is converted and all that goes into building a panel. I plan to use the panels I created for keeping cool at car shows, camping, and other outdoor activities. My next step is to build a more robust enclosure that I can keep outdoors permanently to provide power to my shed.

All in all, there is no single catch-all solution to wean ourselves from our natural energy dependency, but we will need to focus on energy efficiency as well. I feel that the solar technology is sound, and is not too complex if a hobbyist can easily build them with limited resources. I do feel that alternate energy by itself is not the solution, as the panels I built only generate enough power to light 2 60W incandescent light bulbs, but could light 10 compact fluorescents and 15 LED light bulbs that provide the same amount of light. I do plan to pursue other alternate energy experiments, such as building a windmill and converting a gas powered car over to electric.

Speech given 6/13/11 at Bluegrass Toastmasters club meeting.