The title made me think of my final first year chemistry lab where we made dye-sensitized solar cells from raspberries. It was an incredibly low-tech process aside from the conductive oxide-coated glass slides used as the electrodes. I'd love to see an in-depth guide on this solar panel design.
How to Build a Low-Tech Solar Panel?
41–50 of 75 posts
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Solar Panel?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is pretty cool on its own but the fact you did it before the internet using a newspaper is very interesting. I really struggle to imagine how I'd do anything without looking online.
There used to be bookstores and magazine shops. I don't quite mean to say these no longer exist outside of airport waiting areas but they were ubiquitous. Libraries were a source of knowledge rather than a place to get free wifi. Wikipedia's predecessor came as a shelf of books. This sounds snarky but I don't mean it as such. It's what was available and how much knowledge was passed around. It wasn't hard to learn ab…
A little on a tangent, but I've been thinking that it might be valuable to keep this offline knowledge infra around for backup, afaik properly stored book has lifespan that is still an order of magnitute longer than any digital storage.
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Solar Panel?
#43After school, my son Carter and I explored engineering, science, and math, with our first experiment:
Attaching a Bilge Pump to a 100 watt solar panel. The Setup Could move Thousands Gallons of Water Off Grid!
Reference: https://youtu.be/E9Ea2n1vryo
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Solar Panel?
#44This is quite fascinating, if true. Having studied solar photovoltaics fairly extensively in both undergrad and grad school, I'm a bit skeptical that he achieved such efficiency with such a simple design, but it's not completely impossible.
It's important to note, though, that most of the cost of present day polysilicon solar cells comes not from the semiconductor device and contacts, but from the module and supporting electronics. So trading cell efficiency for cost will actually degrade overall installation cost per watt (since you'll need more of the more expensive parts), AND increase the amount of land required.
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Solar Panel?
#45My father and I built a solar powered dog house heater in the 80s. We got the idea and plans from a Detroit area newspaper. The “cell” was simply plywood painted black behind a piece of glass with room in between for air movement. It successfully raised a fully sealed box (perhaps almost 1sq meter) to 40 deg C in the dead of Michigan winter. It also got me a blue ribbon at the science fair. I’ve been intrigued by sol…
I've been working on my parents to put this thing in their garden: https://frank.geekheim.de/?p=2476
I'd do it myself but I'm a city dweller with not even a balcony... :|
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Solar Panel?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is pretty cool on its own but the fact you did it before the internet using a newspaper is very interesting. I really struggle to imagine how I'd do anything without looking online.
There used to be bookstores and magazine shops. I don't quite mean to say these no longer exist outside of airport waiting areas but they were ubiquitous. Libraries were a source of knowledge rather than a place to get free wifi. Wikipedia's predecessor came as a shelf of books. This sounds snarky but I don't mean it as such. It's what was available and how much knowledge was passed around. It wasn't hard to learn ab…
Or if you couldn't find it in a library, you could call a librarian: company, city, university, or otherwise.
I enjoyed the film Desk Set. Katherine Hepburn is one of those librarians, working at a pseudo-NBC company in the 50s. (As a special bonus, it features early movie mainframe hijinks.)
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Solar Panel?
#47I put some used PV panels on my shed's roof and wired them up to the bottom element of my electric water heater. This cut my household electric use in half. Not connected to the grid so no expensive permits needed.
Sorta related if you don't want to hack that sort of thing yourself -
Hybrid Hot Water Heater Saves 69 Percent On Energy Consumption:
https://russell.ballestrini.net/hybrid-hot-water-heater-save...
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Solar Panel?
#48It's a cute approach, but perovskite solar cells can probably do much better. Perovskite solar cells can be made at close to room temperature, use relatively common elements, and can be made fairly thin. The current efficiency record for perovskite solar cells is 25.6%[0]. [0] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/06/unist-epfl-claim-25-6...
Perovskites break down when exposed to moisture, so while I do think you could DIY a solar cell pretty easily, it wouldn't last long. There are ways around the moisture problem, but they're not so easily DIYable. "In particular, water promotes fast decomposition, leading to a drastic decrease in device performance." [0]
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Solar Panel?
#49"This website runs on a solar powered server located in Barcelona, and will go off-line during longer periods of bad weather." - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html What a lovely idea.
I realize this is almost completely off-topic for the article, but I really like the way this website communicates the server's charge levels with color and indicators as a percent of the page's visible area.
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Solar Panel?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is pretty cool on its own but the fact you did it before the internet using a newspaper is very interesting. I really struggle to imagine how I'd do anything without looking online.
There used to be bookstores and magazine shops. I don't quite mean to say these no longer exist outside of airport waiting areas but they were ubiquitous. Libraries were a source of knowledge rather than a place to get free wifi. Wikipedia's predecessor came as a shelf of books. This sounds snarky but I don't mean it as such. It's what was available and how much knowledge was passed around. It wasn't hard to learn ab…
Pre-internet people subscribed to specialized periodicals. Home Power and Mother Earth News were two. Both were filled with case studies and DIY projects and the back pages had "send $5 for plans to build your own low-head hydro." I'm sure there were more publications (Stewart Brand's publications come to mind, Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly for two.) The archives of Home Power (1987 - 2018) are here: https://www.homepower.com/
Popular Mechanics and other "Popular xxx" magazines are also examples. If you were lucky your local library subscribed so you could read them there (hopefully people hadn't stolen the issues or ripped pages out.)