Garys DIY Solar Panels
This has allowed me to save money and have a off grid water supply. I used to haul my water in a gallon tank on a 30 mile round trip. The savings on gasoline has made the purchase of the parts pay for itself many times over.. I have an electronics' background, which included a lot of dc wiring. I'm not saying anyone can make a solar panel, but if you can use common hand tools, you can.
A lot of what I learned online was incorrect, so I decided to write this book to help you avoid some mistakes I made and save you time and money.. So enjoy, read the book and get ready to make your own DIY solar panels. All the parts you need are listed in the book and all can be found on E-Bay. Kindle Edition , 42 pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Debra Hurst rated it liked it Aug 21, Lubi Solar rated it it was amazing Dec 06, Mary rated it really liked it Aug 11, Frank Thomalla rated it it was amazing Apr 25, Humble Bragger rated it really liked it Nov 06, Barbara Mumpower rated it it was amazing Jan 26, Jesse Crumb rated it liked it Jul 26, Rob Thompson rated it liked it May 19, Edward Trent Udovick rated it it was amazing Nov 06, Energy Inc, rated it it was amazing Jan 30, Tim Norris rated it liked it May 16, Kina Monster rated it liked it Aug 22, February 8, , 2: Open offer to hit me up with solar questions in the future.
All in the tribe I suppose. Jamie Costello February 9, , 7: Im curious if you have a link for those classy LED replacements you speak of. Thanks for this article, it has inspired me to give solar panels on our personal home a harder look. Money Mustache February 10, , 3: Hey Jamie — sure: They were Philips brand in the T8 shape and the school required a K color temperature. Michael R February 10, , 7: TomTrottier February 17, , 1: For art you want coloujr accuracy. CRI — colour rendering index — is most important.
It shows how balanced the spectrum is. Tony February 10, , That was going to be my question, whether or not you could add to the setup later. So as long as the inverter can handle the input, you can add more panels? Considering solar on our garage but maybe starting with one side of the gable….
Be carefull how much good you do outside of the bureaucracy. You should just get famous too! Friends DO always pop over to help each other with projects. Money Mustache to experience this phenomenon. And one of the big messages I try to share here is to work on this aspect of your life. Start a small business.
- Gary's DIY Solar Panels by Gary James.
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- My DIY Solar Power Setup – Free Energy for Life.
- Of Prayer;
Reach out to people who run companies in your area, and find ways to help them. Use Craigslist for most transactions, and meet the people in your community. These are things that help make you more pleasant to be around. Charming myself — I still have lots of work to do in this department. But at least I know the general direction I want to take my life, and how to move in that direction.
Colin February 8, , 3: In the last year my two best project-doing friends — who lived within walking distance — moved away. Marcia February 8, , 1: I have friends that pop over and help! I have helped other friends with sewing too. My neighbors have traded their skills with building and planting and growing. My other neighbor is a chiropractor with lots of friends who do landscaping, building, and are fishermen. Lots of trading going on! I bought from ML Solar, which had the best prices I could find, and luckily just happened to be 60 miles from my home, so I went and picked them up for less than the shipping would have cost.
Managed to get all the panels in the back of my Jetta wagon, and the racking on the roof. Mount the solar panels just high enough to comfortably walk, drive, and park beneath then rake in the free solar. Same goes for parks in need of a little shade. This would make loads of sense, because parking lots are usually completely unshaded.
Some cities already have large installations like this in place especially places like Phoenix where cars and summer sun are a super-unpleasant combination. The key to making it all work cost effectively is a really cost-effective system to bolt together over the existing parking spaces. If you can minimize the engineering, steel, concrete and building permit aspects, then things start looking much better. The same argument applies to choosing small, lightweight bike infrastructure over the massive stuff we need to build to support cars!
Almost all the County buildings here in Santa Clara County are doing that now. Even the Elmwood Jail has solar covered parking for the employees. Kris February 9, , 5: Michigan State University did this in the past year for some of their huge lots on the edges of campus. February 10, , Ford did just that at HQ: Sarah February 24, , Maverick February 9, , 1: If you ever have the chance and are in north-central California, visit the Sierra Nevada brewery in Chico. The parking lot has about 11, panels mounted on racks about ten feet up.
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The racks also support hop bines growing up them, for an extra bonus. I bet it was generating nice returns on the blazing degree day I was there one summer. Anne Marie February 13, , 1: They did this at my workplace! Anonymous February 7, , Thanks, fixed that now too.
Los Angeles is a great solar installation location, because of both the sun and the ultra-high electricity prices. MMM roasted the guy who criticized the friends-helped-me-do-this comment, but I think this deserves it more. The information you seek is out there right now, you can go get it yourself and do the math now, no need to wait 2 years.
KT February 7, , Great post, thank you. I have been on the fence on this one for the same reasons. I will get it done this year, though the ridiculous tariffs really chap my hide. My assumption is that the grid tying incentives will phase out as more homes adopt solar and that a shift to a battery system may be required.
Gary's DIY Solar Panels
At any rate, this is good stuff! Yes, a good point — California already has a surplus of daytime solar, as do parts of Australia. But my local grid is still in the opposite situation: As you get to a higher percentage of solar energy in any given area, you need to start adding storage to absorb the peak production and feed it out during the evening. It is quite a nice synergy that storage and transportation both drive the demand for high capacity batteries, which means the cost per kWh of storage can drop at a much faster rate, driving both electric transport and storage into even wider adoption.
In CA they have addressed some of the problems that rooftop solar creates for the grid by adopting a new standard in inverter technology, ULSA. Old systems have 10 years to upgrade, all new ones must meet the new standard. Have you looked into heat-pump dryers? Maybe still too pricey. We had a gas dryer but switched to electric when we put in panels. Get one with several heat levels, so you can run it on low or extra-low and it draws a lot less, to match your panel output even on a cloudy day. Ideally, they will start to make smart appliances that look at your solar generation and modify their power consumption accordingly.
But yes, there are nights when we just turn it on to get something dry and eat the cost. We are also seeing our local utility stigmatize distributed generation their industry term for homeowner roof-top panels. A utility is a way for investors to park their money build a power plant and get guaranteed returns protected by rate increases, where the PUCs are mostly regulatory capture. Most of them are building their own solar farms now, because it is cheaper than fossil fuels for daytime production, and because they still want to sell you power, not have you make it yourself. Fact is that in sunny places, solar has already eliminated their daytime peak mostly from air-conditioning , and now they are complaining about the new peak that happens in the evening, when the sun has gone down and people get home from work and turn on lights and appliances.
And now storage technologies will help with the evening peak by diverting the excess daytime production. Pumped hydro and industrial-scale batteries are the most mature, just imagine all those old car batteries racked up next to a solar farm. Eventually, we should realize that net-metering is an incentive needed at first to jump-start the rooftop solar industry , and that retail-wholesale rates are fairer to the utility and community all around.
That way, you pay the utility the infrastructure cost for moving that energy around. But now, what they want to do is curtail the homeowner solar: I think this is purely for profit motives and has nothing to do with the purported technical reasons. The solution, of course, is to promote time-of-use: That will encourage day-time electric car charging, especially at workplaces.
Chris Stratton February 8, , When I go back and read some of the early posts on this blog, they are pretty clunky and asking to be rewritten. Sometimes I dislike them so much that I actually do dig back in and fix some stuff. But the overall theme is that retirement is a great time for continued growth. Sarah February 27, , 9: I heard this quote while listening to the radio today: And the gentleman had quite the mustache — check it out!: You have written hundreds of meaningful, powerful articles and even a speech or two, and can have every confidence in your ability to string together words and ideas comprehensibly at this point.
You have built a movement through your words, and I congratulate you. Chris February 8, , 1: I had solar panels fitted around 2 years ago here in the UK, costs are a lot higher and our panels are South-East facing. Payback is looking to be around 7 years. This is awesome Pete. Joanne February 8, , 4: Also, the slippery black glass can shed the snow pretty quickly even when temparatures are a bit below freezing. But you would probably find that deeper snowfalls shut off production for a while. I made a long wooden squeegee-shaped thing to rake the snow off of this system, just for fun.
Not a huge deal, since in Northern latitudes most of the daylight is in the summer months anyway. Bret February 8, , 1: I installed a DIY system last year and my biggest problem in Iowa was, it would snow, then get really cold. The snow would then basically freeze in place until it was well above freezing for a few days or even a week. I went out a couple times after it was above freezing with the hose and would spray them to help melt the snow. JustGeorge April 18, , 3: Congrats on the rake Mr. Also, the lower the temperature inside the working limits given by the PV manufacturer keeps the efficiency of the panels high.
AW February 8, , 4: If you look at it another way…. At that price, the solar panels were free. Because of the performance warranties and long life of the panels, the solar equipment may take years to depreciate. Basically you have converted cash into home equity. The solar panels are more like a monthly dividend.
Some months are better than others. AW February 10, , 6: So any surplus is delivered to the grid. In the evening when the solar system is producing the least or not at all, we are using electricity from the grid. At the end of the month, if we use more from the grid than the solar system, we are charged for that usage.
If we deliver more to the grid, we carry surplus balance of kWh that carries over to the next month. We usually see surpluses of kWh starting in March through July. The only catch is that each year in June, Duke Energy resets the surplus kWh to zero…. Last year, the utility kept kWh of our clean solar energy. Because we are tied into the grid and for safety, when the grid goes down so does our solar system. The micro-inverters are designed this way.
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- BuildItSolar: Solar energy projects for Do It Yourselfers to save money and reduce pollution?
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As long as the micro-inverters see continuous power, the solar system will continue to operate. Our power is fairly reliable so we have not seen the cost benefit of such an upgrade. Stephen February 8, , 5: Over here the electricity grid gives you back exactly zero now if you feed in. Only some legacy customers who have older contracts get paid, and even that is at a rate below wholesale. Also as a customer, you pay a standing charge just for being connected. To top it all off, the retail arm of the grid started offering panels last year. I hear you, local regulations can make a big difference on the cost-effectiveness of a project like this.
In fact, because this is on a commercial address, I too have a fixed monthly fee for now that eats up most of the profits. But most people require a financial incentive to make a change. Gary February 8, , 5: I was really interested to read this article because I work in the electricity industry energy consultant and I have been a big MMM fan for the last couple of years. However, I am curious as to why you are fighting the fixed charge?
You stated yourself that you are essentially using the grid as a battery. So it only seems to make sense that you have to pay for that, no? Yes, you are saving the utility some fuel costs during the middle of the day when your solar is exporting, but there are still a lot of other fixed costs that need to be covered. In CA, where I live, this indirect subsidy from net metering could grow to over 2 billion dollars in the next decade.
Ironically, it will be mainly richer people who own homes and buy solar that will be profiting from this. I love the idea of DIY solar and being self sufficient, but I think it needs to be done in a fair way. In a different reply above, I mentioned that retail-wholesale rates are much more equitable.
You get paid the wholesale rate for the kWh you put into the grid, similar to what the industrial solar farm gets paid. The utility immediately resells that kWh at the normal rate, which has the transmission, maintenance, and admin costs built in. When you need a kWh in the evening or on a cloudy day, you pay the normal retail rate as well, thus you pay for the electricity and transmission, maintenance, and admin costs as well. The risk of installing rooftop solar is that the industry prevails over homeowner interests some would say rights and curtails your PV output instead of the power plant output.
Of course, the optimal situation is when you consume your own electricity during the day, for example charging an electric car, plus enough to zero your bill. For this reason, electric cars and PV solar go very well together, each amplifying the savings from the other. Call February 9, , It sounds like you may live where I do. I put panels 4KW on my roof in Summer Between when I started getting quotes, to today, the power company state owned has changed the solar rules 4 times.
The next paragraph though, talks about how if you have solar panels, they are charging you more, or somehow increasing the costs. When I started getting quotes, payback was calculated at 6. Functionally, they have more than doubled my costs. Johnson February 9, , They are also charging you for all of the infrastructure required to deliver that power to you. Brian Bailey February 8, , 7: Nice write up, thank you! As a burgeoning solar installer in an area pretty different from Colorado Front Range, perhaps I can add a little more color. As some have mentioned, not all power companies are friendly to distributed generation like rooftop solar.
Ours is pretty hostile. Although Indiana is technically a net-metering state, the utility has introduced fees to net metering customers designed to make it uneconomic. For places where net metering is not available, a small battery backup may be worthwhile. Conscientious owners can also design strategies to use solar as it is produced, such as by using delay timers for dryers, washers and cookers to take advantage of power production at midday. Another, low-cost option in areas hostile to net-metering is to start with a small solar system designed to power the base load of the house, i.
This type of system can have a relatively quick payback period since all or most of the power produced gets consumed on the spot. The more people that take the plunge into solar, the better — especially in areas with hostile utilities or politics! Nothing will cause these hostile actors to sit up and take notice more than grassroots expansion of the technology among their neighbors.
Books by Gary James (Author of Gary's DIY Solar Panels)
Angela February 9, , Brian, thanks for your advice regarding hostile solar states. Brian Bailey February 12, , 4: The efficiency side of the equation is often overlooked. The best ROI comes from efficiency efforts: LED bulbs are as easy at it gets. High-efficiency appliances should be the only consideration when making a new purchase.
Tightening up the house by sealing cracks especially in exterior drywall and around the rim joist of the house, two common offenders can be surprisingly effective as well. And, of course, human efficiency is the most powerful of all: Thanks for the sharing your thoughts Brian! I live in IL and wondering if the numbers would make more sense if I installed a system with a small battery backup like you suggest.
Would you mind sharing a typical system that you would install for a sq ft ranch house.. Also, what is the typical payback that you have seen with this style of setup?
The numbers are pretty site- and jurisdiction-specific. For site, your roof angle, house orientation relative to direct south, and shading considerations all play a role. I think your net metering situation in Illinois is more favorable than here in Indiana, though your local utility may or may not be putting up roadblocks. Modern panels guarantee at least linear performance losses at 0. So, a pretty easy call from an investment perspective. A battery will extend the payback.
In exchange for the cost, you get backup power for your house.
My DIY Solar Power Setup – Free Energy for Life
My personal system, which is a bit of a cadillac and has a large lithium-ion battery backup the most expensive upfront, but also the most resilient and longest-lasting , carries a payback period of about 20 years. I also have significant shading issues. So my house is pretty close to a worst-case scenario, and I end up with a whole-house generator that never runs out of fuel and will at least pay for itself over its lifetime. You would need either net metering or a larger battery to feed the vehicle with stored solar power while the sun is down. If you were charging it during the day, then it would be a great energy storage unit: Susan May 14, , 5: I heard a speaker explain that he has off grid solar as a backup system.
He said that many people buy electric cars and then change their mind, so the prices on used electric cars are quite cheap. Rachel February 8, , 7: I did the Google Project Sunroof thing…I have too many trees: I would only have sqft. Maybe with increased efficiency even that small of an area will eventually be worth it. Mike Shoup February 8, , 7: I admit to being very hesitant and anxious for some of this stuff. HamMan February 8, , 7: This is something my wife and I have been researching for a while as well, especially since we got an electric vehicle. I would really appreciate more information on your financial numbers, especially how you calculate the returns and payback period.
I did some math on this recently and found payback times on a 10KW DIY install were closer to 40 years before breaking even. This contrasted harshly with the numbers years that a local solar company was advertising. Also I hate to nitpick but since you asked, I noticed a couple minor details in the article. Rigid conduit is more like gas pipe and uses threaded fittings. Thanks HamMan, I have just made those corrections. If your costs are really looking like 40 times that amount versus about 5x for me , you need to wait and shop and negotiate until you can get much cheaper equipment.
Meanwhile, you can of course work on energy efficiency where the cheaper returns usually await. Marc February 8, , 7: But with the price you showed here maybe one of these is indeed in my future, especially once after we move to a more permanent home. Yeah, so far I have found that cloudy days can still be surprisingly productive I see my panels still putting out watts when the sky looks completely gloomy.
But the deep shade of woods would be much worse. Brian Bailey February 8, , Shading is a significant issue, but it might not be as bad as you think. Our house is surrounded by huge hardwoods and very shaded, but our 5 kW system still pumps out a good amount of power though admittedly less than it would if it were in full sun. Or you can go hardcore Mustachian: A good solar installer, if you have one in your area, would do a shading analysis right off the bat. Shawna February 8, , 7: Is solar to a home system as economical? As well the cost seems super low — is solar really that much cheaper in the USA?!?!
Kyle February 8, , 7: Fantastic job and great write-up. This DIY system that provides both solar space and water heating in a single system. The Solar Space Heating section has solar water and air heating systems with and without storage -- some 87 projects. The Solar Water Heating section provides many DIY builds for solar water heating systems including batch, thermosyphon, drain back, and closed loop systems, solar showers, solar stock tanks, kits, A cost effective, high R value wall for retrofit or new construction.
The simplest and cheapest way ever to cut window heat loss about in half! The Energy Conservation Page provides ranging from free bubble wrap window insulation to complete redo's of homes. Insulation, appliances, window treatments, lighting, drying, Over 90 projects to build. An easy to build gallon rain water harvest system from our shop roof. Plus a basics and DIY guides section.
The Solar Homes section is a very large collection of information on designing and building solar and energy efficient homes -- plans, construction techniques, design information, examples The Solar Pool and Hot Tub Heating section give design and build information for solar pool and hot tub heater builds. Plus DIY collector designs, natural pools, wood heaters, The Solar Cooking and Food Drying section has more than 40 projects for building solar cookers and ovens, solar food drying, and root cellars.
I'm an engineer -- there is lots of analytical and design information here. The Experimental Section -- new ideas, new technologies, down to earth experimental stuff.