I spent yesterday at Alex Moody’s house (ex-colleague at XCO2) eating barbequed pizza (awesome) and wiring up a home-made PV panel from single cells (even better). Equipped with an almost-hot-enough soldering iron, I was a one man tabbing line while Alex put the wooden box together. When I left in the late afternoon, Alex took over and finished the lot.
This panel will one day power Alex’s LED-based garden lighting. Next steps are to get the string working with the charge controller and battery.
At Fontenergy, we’re doing some industrial PV installations in Italy. I’m really looking forward to seeing them up and running but I can’t help feeling that building a single 60W panel from scratch might be more satisfying (if in a slightly different way) than seeing a rooftop covered with someone else’s panels.
Worth putting between a couple of sheets of glass with silicon or similar edge seal and some sachets of silica gel.
We ran a caravan and home office of a DIY PV panel for about a year with some wind added as winter set in. I think Dulas Engineering made a rig for testing cells to sort them for this purpose (in Eritrea probably) in the early 80s.
Nick