HOW TO MAKE A SIMPLE SOLAR PANEL

With the cost of everything constantly going up in price it is becoming much more difficult for anyone to keep up with their utility bills, and especially during this severe economic depression that the world is going through. This has all been felt more so during this long and severe winter which has hit almost all the countries in the northern hemisphere and forced people to put their heating on more than was normally usual. Many people will have received horrendous electricity bills and are wishing that there were an alternative way of bringing energy into their home.

But imagine making use of something that is totally free to everyone, which is the energy from the sun, and being able to channel it towards your heating necessities!.

One doesn't have to pay for using the sun, it doesn't need any kind of maintenance and we can benefit from it during many hours of the day during 365 days of the year.

If plants use the energy from the sun as their source of food and animals use it as a source of heat, then us humans can use it for other things such as getting electricity in order to heat water.

But after investigating how much it would cost to have solar panels installed in an ordinary house and finding out that an average estimate (including the installation) was of the order of over $27,000, trying to make your own solar panels just has to be worth giving a try.

So here outlined is a very basic way of obtaining hot water from solar energy and although it seems impossible to do, it really is quite the opposite and quite simple.

In fact, you could even build a larger one for less than $27 if you took the time to rebuild and connect “broken solar cells” together, but that is another story. And although the instructions below are solely for building a very small and basic solar panel the concept is always the same and can be done on a grander scale so as to obtain more than just a cup of coffee!!!

The materials that are needed are the following:

-A thick cardboard box or one of those polystyrene refrigerators that people take to the beach or on picnics. 

-A 2 litre plastic bottle.

-Black paint.

-Aluminium foil.

-1 role of cellophane.

This is what a normal solar panel looks like.

Procedure

Rinse the bottle several times and once dry paint the outside of the bottle black.

Place the bottle inside the cardboard box or polystyrene refrigerator and place some some supports within the box so as to ensure that the bottle stays exactly where it is and completely immobilised.

Line the bottom and inner side of the box with aluminium foil and secure it all with adhesive tape. Fill the bottle ¾ full with water and then compress it so that the water reaches the top.

Cover the whole of the box with cellophane/cling film and again secure with adhesive tape.

Now face the box towards a northerly orientation with an incline of about 45 ° from the ground so as to make full use of the Sun's rays. In as little as about two to five hours you will have sufficient hot water (from the plastic bottle) in order to prepare a coffee or any other hot beverage.
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