Building solar panels has grown by leaps and bounds the past few years and for good reason. The price to manufacture solar panels has dropped drastically over the past 2 years. When we first started converting our house to a grid tie system the average cost per watt of a commercial solar panel was in the $8/watt range. That quickly dropped to $5/watt and is now hovering around the ~$2.75 mark (depending on where you look and the quality you want).

If you compare that with the cost of buying all the components to make a similar performing and looking panel you’ll be quite surprised at the savings you can get (I’ll even break down an hourly rate of savings as well).

These days we buy all of our renewable energy supplies off of eBay so I’m going to show you something neat. Here’s a link which will show you the solar panel listings (click here). You can figure out the price per watt by dividing the price (make sure you include shipping!) by the number of watts you get. Now, go check out the cost of tabbed solar cells. If you buy in bulk you can get the solar cells (which are about 50% of the cost) for 0.30/watt!

Savings By Building Your Own

While it sounds pretty great to get solar cells at 0.30/watt, solar cells aren’t the only thing that you need to build a solar panel. You’re also going to need the following things:

• 2′ x 4′ 3/8″ Plexiglass
• 2′ x 4′ Backing (multiple options)
• Soldering Iron
• Solder
• Flux
• Bus Wire
• Silicone (white or clear, white is preferred)
• White “J” flashing (works great for prettying up the edges)
• Assorted Tools

The 72 Watt Panel

The most popular type of solar panel to build is a 72 watt panel. The reason for this is simple… There are several different sizes of solar cells, but the most common ones (and best in my opinion) are the 3″ x 6″ cells. The reason these are used is that they are pretty much the highest output cells you can buy (they produce 3.98 amps @ 0.55 volts). That means you can use less cells and have a higher output panel.

The other reason that the 72 watt panel is the most popular is that 36 of these cells fit perfectly on a 2′ x 4′ piece of backing/plexiglass front. That means there is no material wastage which means each panel costs less!

Can I Do This?

One of the biggest challenges newcomers to DIY renewable energy have is trying to figure out whether or not this is something that they can do themselves. It just seems so technical!

I have some good news for you though…

Building your own solar panel really isn’t as hard as you think. The hardest thing to learn is probably learning how to solder the cells together. Soldering sounds more difficult than it is. It really is as simple as touching the 2 pieces together and melting a little solder on the joint. I’ve taught thousands of people how to do it in less than 5 minutes.

The rest of building solar panels is really about being precise. It’s a matter of making sure the cells line up before you connect them together, making sure the backing is a nice white and making sure that everything is sealed up nicely.

How Much Can I Save?

The savings are really limitless, but I’ll give a quick overview of the monetary AND time savings. Each panel takes roughly 2 hours to build. While the first one or two may take you 3 hours to build, once you get the hang of it they just seem to fly off your workbench.

The difference in cost between a commercial version and a DIY version is about $120. That means for every hour that you work building solar panels you save $60 (or earn $60 depending how you look at it). I don’t know about you, but I don’t know of to many jobs where you earn $60/hour.

As an aside (and something you should think about) is that you can actually build solar panels, sell them and make a tidy profit off of each one. The work is easy and there is certainly a demand for solar panels at the moment.