Urgent Evoke

A crash course in changing the world.

My Laptops Battery died about a year ago. I never got a replacement for it. So I thought about Solar Power for it. I researched some idea's and thought about trying to build something as a project but it would require me to spend more money than I have to actually get something done. So I decided to post my notes about this.

The first set of instructions I read are from this web page. This guy includes pictures and his end result looks like this

Here is a portion of the posting

So what is a solar panel anyway? It is basically a box that holds an array of solar cells. Solar cells are the things that do the actual work of turning sunlight into electricity. However, it takes a lot of cells to make a meaningful amount of power, and they are very fragile, so the individual cells are assembled into panels. The panels hold enough cells to make a useful amount of power and protect the cells from the elements. It doesn't sound too complicated. I was convinced I could do it myself.

I started out the way I start every project, by Googling for information on home-built solar panels. I was shocked at how few I found. The fact that very few people were building their own panels led me to think it must be harder to do than I thought. The project got shelved for a while, but I never stopped thinking about it.

After a while, I came to some conclusions:

  • The main stumbling block to building solar panels is acquiring solar cells at a reasonable price.
  • New solar cells are very expensive, and can even sometimes be hard to find in quantity at any price.
  • Blemished and damaged solar cells are available on Ebay and other places at a fraction of the cost of new perfect cells.
  • These second rate solar cells could probably be used to make a solar panel that would work just fine.

Once I came to the realization that I could use blemished and factory-second solar cells to build my panels, I finally got to work. I started by buying some solar cells off of Ebay

The second set of instructions I reviewed was even more basic about actually building a solar cell using parts from a hardware store. I might try to do this one down the road if I can get the extra cash together to make it. It looks like this.

A portion from the web page follows.

A solar cell is a device for converting energy from the sun into electricity. The high-efficiency solar cells you can buy at Radio Shack and other stores are made from highly processed silicon, and require huge factories, high temperatures, vacuum equipment, and lots of money.

If we are willing to sacrifice efficiency for the ability to make our own solar cells in the kitchen out of materials from the neighborhood hardware store, we can demonstrate a working solar cell in about an hour.

Our solar cell is made from cuprous oxide instead of silicon. Cuprous oxide is one of the first materials known to display the photoelectric effect, in which light causes electricity to flow in a material.

Thinking about how to explain the photoelectric effect is what led Albert Einstein to the Nobel prize for physics, and to the theory of relativity.

Materials you will need

The solar cell is made from these materials:

  1. A sheet of copper flashing from the hardware store. This normally costs about $5.00 per square foot. We will need about half a square foot.
  2. Two alligator clip leads.
  3. A sensitive micro-ammeter that can read currents between 10 and 50 microamperes. Radio Shack sells small LCD multimeters that will do, but I used a small surplus meter with a needle.
  4. An electric stove. My kitchen stove is gas, so I bought a small one-burner electric hotplate for about $25. The little 700 watt burners probably won't work -- mine is 1100 watts, so the burner gets red hot.
  5. A large clear plastic bottle off of which you can cut the top. I used a 2 liter spring water bottle. A large mouth glass jar will also work.
  6. Table salt. We will want a couple tablespoons of salt.
  7. Tap water.
  8. Sand paper or a wire brush on an electric drill.
  9. Sheet metal shears for cutting the copper sheet.

Hope this helps some of you in actually building something. I know if I had the resources I would be like a made scientist in my kitchen.

Blessings and Peace and Love.

Love Robert

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