Solar Panels for Home

There's a lot of great information floating around the internet lately. there are tons of articles and how to manuals that will guide you step by step throughout the process of building your own residential solar panels. Most of these guides allow you to cheaply put together a real working home solar panel that will actually generate power. And that's great! More people should take the plunge and adopt a green power philosophy in their lives.

First let me say that I'm a huge advocate of starting out with a DIY solar panel that you make yourself. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that it gives you a very unique perspective into using solar power at home. This alone is probably the most important aspect since you realize that it's something that does work, and is easily achievable by the average person.

The second reason why it's such a good idea, is that it exposes you to the nuts and bolts of using solar energy at home. Any solar panel that you build is functionally almost identical to any of the commercially available residential solar panels being sold today. So if you cut your teeth so to speak on a homemade solar power system and decide later on that you'd like to incorporate a higher output, commercially available system, the transition should be simple. Both systems consist of the same elements:

Solar panels
Batteries
Charge controllers
inverters

And there is a good chance that most of the pieces of your homemade system can be used with manufactured solar panels. Even your original homemade panels can probably be integrated into your system.

So for those reasons, I'd recommend that anyone interested in getting into solar power start by building their own panels. You'll learn a lot about the process and the individual components.

Now after you've had your homemade system for awhile, you'll start to realize it has many limitations. The law of diminishing returns applies, and you'll see that there's only a certain amount of power that you'll be able to economically produce. Sure, you could make 100 solar panels and generate more power than what you'll use, but if you take into account the time you've spent building these panels, plus the costs of all of the individual solar cells that you'll use, plus the tabbing material, solder, frames, and covers you'll soon realize that it's not very cost effective. When you finally realize this, you may want to consider commercially available solar panels for home.

There are a couple of different paths you can take when going the commercially available route. The first is buying new. This is often more expensive, but you start out with a brand new panel that presumably has a factory warranty and support, and is at the peak of it's output.

The second option is buying used solar panels for your home. Even though the power output of a home solar panel may decrease over time, it's not enough of a drop to rule out used solar panels.You can very often buy them at a fraction of their original cost, and even being used, their output is almost always greater than a home made solar panel.

So while we'd all like to be able to build everything we need, it's not the most practical solution. Unless of course you have an unlimited supply of free time and materials. But if you're like the rest of us, you don't have those options. Using commercial solar panels to power your home is not a bad thing, it's a natural progression in your journey to energy independence.

One very interesting thing of note is that according to the United States Government, even if you purchase brand new solar panels, the payback is 4 years or less. That's a pretty incredible fact that is far too often overlooked.

Click here for a great selection of new and used Solar Panels for Home