Home Solar Panels

Adding solar panels to your home for both heating water (solar thermal) and producing electricity (solar photovoltaic) can reduce your monthly utility bills, increase the value of your home and reduce your carbon footprint on planet earth.

Let’s start with domestic water heating, solar thermal, as it has the quickest payback. The two basic solar thermal systems use either flat plate collectors or evacuated tube collectors. Both systems work very well at what they do. Another “sub-category” of solar thermal collector is the Integrated Tank Solar Collector. The integrated tank solar collector can use either flat plate or evacuated tubes. It’s big advantage comes through design - not requiring expensive pumps and controllers. Thus, you can install an integrated tank solar collector for about half the cost of a closed loop or drainback system. Just before we leave solar thermal systems, we should mention Batch Solar Thermal Heaters, or breadbox heaters. These systems, often built by the do-it-yourselfer (diy), are very cheap to build and provide some basic hot/warm water. They use a large tank, painted black and often stored in a box, to heat a large quantity of water to a warm temperature. They are good for cottage/cabin use or 3 season use in the home.

Solar photovoltaic systems, turn sunlight directly into electricity (direct current DC). Run this power through a grid-tie inverter and some fuses and you have AC power for your home. One of the nice things about solar P.V. - once installed it’s almost maintenance free. On the down side, you’ll need to take advantage of the various rebates and tax incentives, to get a decent return on your investment.

A few enterprising individuals have even made their own solar PV panels from cracked or defective surplus cells (still working though), that they picked up on ebay. Mike built a 56 watt panel for $105 plus lots of parts he had on hand. Tom built a similar sized panel with similar materials. While it’s nice to see that PV panels can be put together by the do-it-yourselfer, I would not recommend you try this. A manufactured solar panel will last 30+ years and doesn’t cost that much more. These homemade panels will have a much shorter lifespan due to the materials they are made from and issues with moisture and flexing.

One last diy home solar panel you may want to consider, is a solar air heater. These solar panels take air from your home, heat it with the sun and return the air. Great units for reducing your heating bills. This link shows you three different DIY designs: DIY Solar Air Heaters

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Filed under: DIY