Tabbing Solar Cells

Many years ago we decided that we were going to quit paying the power company a monthly mortgage payment. We decided to take a leap of faith and live on renewable energy. We were doing just find until we found out how much a renewable energy installation cost. Needless to say it was way over our budget. It's very sad that renewable energy is out of a regular persons budget.

That didn't stop us though. We were going to live on renewable energy we just needed to figure out a cheaper way to accomplish this. I figured it would be much cheaper if we could manage to build it ourselves. I decided to start with solar panels because where we live it usually is sunny more than it is windy.

I needed to find a good cheap source of solar cells... this turned out to be a lot harder than I first thought. It's impossible to buy new solar cells cheaper than what it would cost to buy a solar panel so I kept up my search. It turns out that many solar cell manufacturers have different grades of cells. "A" grade is what you see in solar panels. I went looking around for "B" grade cells. These cells work perfectly well the only problem with them really is that there are sometimes small chips around the edges. The great part is that from even 10 feet away you can't even notice them. I finally found a couple guys on ebay who sell these cells and picked up 100 of them.

I bought untabbed solar cells as they are cheaper. You will need to tab them yourself which isn't really a very hard thing to do. You'll need some solder, tabbing wire, soldering iron, flux and of course some solar cells.

I also grabbed a large tile (ceramic) that I had lying around. The purpose of this is to draw the heat away from the cell while you're soldering it. If the cells get to hot you can damage them, but this prevents that.

Place the cell face up and get your flux out. I recommend getting the pen flux as it's easier to use. Apply a nice thin line down those two white lines that run down the face of the cell. Next, you'll need to cut your tabbing wire and tin it. When cutting tabbing wire always cut it twice as long as your cell because you need to attach whatever's hanging off the front to the back of the next cell when you string them together. Apply some solder to one half of the wire using your soldering iron to move it down the wire. This will allow the solder to bond nicely to the cell and makes your life a heck of a lot easier. Now that you've prepped your cell all you need to do is solder the tabbing wire onto the cell. Remember not to leave the soldering iron in one place too long as you can damage it. I always use a toothpick afterwards to make sure that the tabbing wire has a good bond.

After this you'll need to string your cells together and do some other stuff, but this is a good start to building your own solar panels.