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 have discovered that prices have more than doubled in the last years on solar panels. I may have to modify my prices here. Years ago I was able to purchase solar panels for about $2 per watt. Now you are lucky to find them at $3-4 per watt. Most of them are around $5 per watt.

Therefore, I bought 50 solar cells from Ebay for only $99. I had to buy the flat connecting wire separately, bringing my total to $120 for about 87 watts of power at 12 volts. I am now in the very slow process of assembling my solar panels. I will make two panels in order to keep the size down a bit. The panels will be about 22 inches square each. Below is the picture of my cells.

This is the picture taken from Evergreens site on Ebay. Each cell measures 3x6 inches. The are extremely fragile and thin though, so this is taking a bit more time than I had originally planned. One cell puts out 0.5 volt at 3.5 Amps. This equals 1.75 Watt per cell. You need 36 cells to get 18 volts at 63 Watts. If you were to purchase the panel ready made, it would run you about $300 for this size.

Actually, for this test, I wanted to run 18 watts, which cost about $100 for a ready made panel.

More later...

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.