DIY Build Solar Panels 1/2: Homemade from Scratch

hey thank you so much for watching I'm Pippi Peterson you can connect with me and the RV living community on my website at Pepin is calm as well as on Facebook Instagram and Twitter so this video that's about building a solar panel from scratch I've written a blog to accompany it it has the shopping list dimensions specifications and stuff like that as well as some diagrams that will help you along your way if you're planning to be building a panel along with this video so be sure to check that out start with building your frame the dimensions will fully depend on the size of the cells you buy I'm using inch and a half aluminum angle iron with miter cuts on the corner for the frame I used the same angle iron to cut out my corner brackets as well don't forget to take into account that inner screws on the corners for your overall sizing calculations once your frame is assembled use clear caulking to cushion your glass from the metal and help keep it in place get some help placing the glass into the frame and let the caulking dry I use the same original angle iron to make l brackets to hold my glass in use caulking between the metal in the glass now that I got my frame built and ready it's time to start soldering the cells so how we're going to solder the cells together in the panel is going to be in series so just like we have different connections when hooking up batteries and solar panels so you know you can do series or parallel well series increases the voltage so you can do the same you know variation of hookups on solar cells but I want to do in series so I'm going to do parallel to negative or sorry positive negative positive negative so the front side of the cell is positive and then the back side of the cell is negative so when it's done it'll kind of look like so I've got these tabs on the front side and then I'm going to solder the front tabs to the back so that's going to be series so it'll increase my voltage and that's what I want to do is increase the voltage so I'm going to have 36 cells and so you might be wondering like how do you know how many cells you need well these particular cells are roughly 1/2 volt so if I put 36 cells together in series and they're half a voltage that means the overall voltage of the panel is going to be about 18 volts so I'm going to be using this to charge a 12 volt battery and because there's loss and you know in the wires or there's loss in the charge controller you need roughly 18 volts going into your charge controller to get to charge a 12 volt battery so if I have 36 cells and they're half fold each that's going to be 18 volts so that's how I know how many cells I want and you know depending on your project or what you're doing you can customize it that way so to solder them together this is the tabbing wire it just comes in a spool and I've cut a bunch to be about the size you really only need the size to go from the front to the back of the other panel it's about six inches on these ones and I'm using so this this tabbing wire supposedly has a little bit of solder on it but I'm using solder anyway and I think this one is I'm pretty sure I got non-lead doesn't really matter but I don't really want to work with lead and then I'm using a little bit of the paste kind of flux the flux just kind of helps it like blend a little bit the metal left run and mix together and you only have to solder on the the white line putting the tabbing wire on the blue doesn't really do anything so it just needs to really go down the white line make sure that it gets connected the whole way down and doesn't have little spots where it disconnects so these ones you can you can solder the Front's on separately and then you can put them together on the panel so you may as well get it set up and get all of your cells tabbed so I'm going to see I've got a loose connection there so I've got a big pile of these and I'm just going through these and then once I get these done then I'll go outside and start putting them on the the glass frame before you start laying down your cells you want to make sure you like triple cleaned your glass this is the side that you'll never be able to clean again the other side you can but you want to make sure you've got all the dust off so I've got a few started already you just take one cell and since the front side is already tapped you're going to lay the front side down and then just solder those tabs that you just put down to the little white squares on the back so I'm just going to take a little bit of flex and dab it on each little white square then the flux will help the solder that's already on the tab the tabbing wire to flow on to the back of the solar cell and make sure that you're not overlapping your cells by any chance you want as much of the front side to show so I'm going to get some hot solder on the tip of my gun and make that connection all right so I thought so I have half of my cells down already and they're in their own individual rows they're not connected yet and I just wanted to test just to make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong and I've testing these two to make sure they're fully hooked up and so solar cells and panels you know you can't turn them on and off they pretty much are on when there's Sun going on them so I've got this mirror below and this is raised up so that the Sun shines underneath so that way I can read how much voltage they're getting and then just because of the where the Sun is and the mirror and you know this little setup half of these aren't getting Sun so so the reading will be a little bit less but this is what I'll do is I've got my own meter I've got it on DC volts and so the front side of the cells the blue side is negative I'll put the negative I'll just leave it there the whole time so I'll touch the positive side the back I've got a point four eight six so that's pretty good especially because it's not getting direct sunlight so I should read it about that SOTA bit should be about five or 0.5 and then one and then one and a half to two and a half three three and a half so these are all reading you know pretty much every 0.5 intervals which is good that's exactly what I want so I know that they're all connected so I've actually read all of them in there they're all doing well and you can even check the amps on this but I'm just looking at the volts right now so keep in mind that when you use your flux when it hits the heat sometimes it can splatter so you want to be sure that you're cleaning your glasses you go Plus on your cells that you probably use the flux on to they may have gotten a little bit of flux splatter on them and probably definitely fingerprints so you can actually use I'm just used this glass cleaner it's ammonia free and I'm just kind of wiping the cell down just to get fingerprints off and any little flux splatters also you'll notice that these are going to be running kind of in a snake pattern so if you have the positive tabs going this way on one row they're going to be going this way on the next row so to figure out how to run them and where they're going to be connected in relation to the terminal block and where all the wires will go I've got a diagram on my blog that you can check out that specifically designated towards this project and it will also give a ton of other information you know specs and you know all the like a whole shopping list and dimensions and all sorts of things like that so there's a lot of information there you should check out after a few hours I have got four completely unconnected rows of soldered cells so now I need to connect them together so like if it were a snake right let's imagine a snake the snake's head would start up here and it would go over here and then it would have a curve here you know and then it would have the curve here and then here and then here would be the tail so we're kind of doing that same thing with the we're going to do that with plus bar so this is like it's kind of the same thing as the tabbing wire but it's just a little bit bigger so we'll put a little one here kind of like a cap for the head and the little one will go here where like like the tail and then where it would come and kind of make that corner we'll put a longer one and then over here a longer one and then down here there would be a long one as well I'm just going to put a little bit of flux on the metal you know I got my solder and the gun and I'm going to do what's called a hot solder joint which means I'm going to first melt solder onto the the bus wire and I'll just slide that right underneath and now I'm going to use solder on the tabbing wire and then combine where there's solder already on so that it makes a really strong connection so as you're going through make sure that no wire is going to be touching any metal because that could possibly short out the connection like over here I had to make sure I cut these really close and I haven't cut those yet but obviously you don't want anything hanging out that can be exposed to any sort of elements well the soldering of all of the solar cells in the entire snake formation I was fully done now now I am ready to hook up the wiring so after I got all these wired together I took it over again to my mirror and the sun's you know it's probably like four o'clock right now so the sun's at a really extreme angle and when I put the mirror underneath I couldn't get all of the cells to be lit up or illuminated so because of that I was getting a little bit less of a reading than I should on all of them I should be getting about 18 volts but I was reading between like you know upper 16 and you know into like mid 17 so that's pretty good for not having like full Sun you know and it's coming from a mirror and it's like an odd angles and stuff so I'm going to take it as it's fine if you do go through and you see that your number doesn't increase as you move along then you've probably got like a bad connection or maybe even a bad cell so that should be taken care of but you know I went through most of them and at the end I just like jumped right to the end and I'm pretty happy with the number so anyway stay tuned for the next video where I'm going to hook up all the wires get it to the terminal block so it's fully ready and as well as encase it and then I'll be ready to set it up

Channel: Pippi Peterson

Views: 915,073

Rating: 4.7730193 out of 5

Keywords: Pippi Peterson, homemade solar panels, how to build a solar panel, DIY solar panels, PV panels from scratch, homemade pv panel

Id: 8f10hVL-y0o

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 13 2016