EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => Power/Renewable Energy/EV's => Topic started by: congruentsquare on October 25, 2018, 01:18:59 am
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I would like to build a custom solar panel to maximize the charge surface on the top of my van. Looking through youtube it doesn't seem hard to do but I can't seem to find any guides out there on how to do this properly. Has anyone built a custom solar panel? Is it a good idea?
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Greatscott did a good video on it. At the end of the day I would recommend just buying commercial panels as these are well engineered to withstand the environment, and anything you try to DIY will probably not come close in terms of reliability
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_3gK83bePQ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_3gK83bePQ)
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I looked into this too just because it's so hard to find premade ones without getting raped on shipping. But I ended up finding some 100w ones on Amazon for $160 with free shipping so went with those. Also found another site after the fact that sells bigger ones and does not charge that much for shipping. So they're out there, just hard to find as when I was searching most of the sites I found always ended up being in the US even if I put Canada in my search query.
While looking into making my own I did come to the conclusion that it would actually end up being almost the same price, maybe even more expensive. So the only real reason to make your own is if you absolutely can't find/get premade ones. Otherwise I'd go with ones you can buy.
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There is a horrible history of home made panels going bad in a couple of years. Go with grid tie panels. I can buy these new from local installers, nearly 300W for $130 and no shipping. They always have loosies they want to get rid of. They buy whatever brand is cheapest that week and they often don't match ones from the last batch.
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I guess if you are lucky enough to have local installers then yeah it's a no brainer. That price is crazy cheap. You can't even buy the cells alone for that cheap.
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The reason I want to build a solar panel is to maximize the surface area using a custom panel shape/config.
After a bit of research I've found that it would be hard to do reliably.
Specifically I need to use flexible solar cells that will be mounted on a metal surface and be subjected to scraps and bangs.