With a little hard work and a few hours off your Saturday morning to dedicate on the project, creating a renewable energy source for your household through solar panels is easy.
To make this, the only things you need are a good plan and some materials from your own garage or local hardware shop.
Working knowledge The first thing that you need to know in order to make your own homemade solar panels is a working knowledge of how energy and electricity can be harnessed from the sun.
Solar panels work by concentrating light from the sun into a generator.
This can be done in several ways.
The easiest is through the use of photovoltaic cells, which are the same things that you find on calculators.
This is the direct conversion process that will immediately transform light into energy.
With enough solar cells on a solar panel, an entire household's electricity needs can actually be met.
In fact, there are even some households that have air-conditioning and temperature regulated wine cellars powered solely by these solar panels.
Other devices Apart from photovoltaic cells, however, you can also try using other devices such as a parabolic trough.
These are curved mirrors that will focus energy into a tube of liquid which will then begin to heat up.
The heat from this fluid is used to create electricity in a generator in much the same way that steam engines create energy.
This is a bit more difficult to create yourself, however, but this is also very powerful and is used by some areas like California, Spain, and Germany to power not only households but even entire communities.
With this in mind, you will only need to purchase solar cells.
These can be bought cheaply in the internet.
Create your own solar panels on which to arrange these cells, and connect it to a battery bank or an electrical outlet.
The detailed procedures are slightly longer, but homemade solar panels are actually a pretty simple do-it-yourself home project.