Well, last night I got home and found my solar panel on the floor. It had fallen out of the window sometime during the day, so the battery obviously did not get fully charged.

But, I decided to hook up my floor lamp to an inverter, which was hooked up to the battery. I was only in the living room for an hour, but the light worked quite well. I am only using a simple 12 Volt 6 Ah alarm battery. It was sitting at 12.5 Volts when I started and dropped to 12.20 and held there while I was using the light. The light was the 50 Watt CFL lamp I just bought.

Later, when I get a proper solar panel, I will put it up on the roof for better charging. Right now, it is only getting about 50% of the available light. It is a good test to see what I can do with that little bit of energy though.

Anyway, I propped the solar panel up last night and am anxious to see what tonight will bring. I will be entertaining guests, so that will really be a test.

I discovered that my solar panel is too weak. I am waiting for a new one to come in. The plan is to use an 18Watt panel. I had no idea how large my old one was. I have had it laying around collecting dust.

I have been using some LED lights in the evening to light my living room for now. They come as an expandable series of puck lights that normally hook up to a wall power supply. There are three pucks with 5 LEDs each. I cut the wires and hooked them up directly to my battery since they were 12 volts anyway. The puck lights work great to light up the room while watching tv.

When all the parts get here, I will post the sources of everything so that anyone who wants to copy this setup can do so.

I just moved to the country!

Now I can put my solar panels outside in the full sunlight and really begin testing. I had to have them in my sliding glass doors because my landlord would not allow me to put them outside anywhere.

Well, now I have an apartment on 1.5 acres of free, wild land in the mountains. When I get a warmer day, the panels are going outside in the full sun. I will set up sunlight tracking systems for maximum energy output during the daylight hours.

I was only getting some light directly on the panels during the mid day in my old place. This provided enough energy to power a couple energy efficient lights and my netbook in the evenings.

With solar tracking, I should get about 870 watt hours of energy during the ten hour long winter days and up to 1300 watts during the summer months.

I have an idea to increase the energy output even more. If you look up "Bedini Motor" or "SSG" on the internet, you will find a sort of "free" energy generator. It takes a small amount of energy to run it and puts out larger amounts of energy into batteries. I have been experimenting with this idea for a few years now and may try using solar energy to power the Bedini motor, which will charge batteries.

Above is a picture of a roller skate wheel generating electricity using the Bedini concept.