Solar panel racks, mounted and the guide!
Posted by admin on 24/10/2009
Hi me again, Dave
I’m a bit surprised by myself I must admit because I didn’t expect to enjoy doing this, I just wanted to share our experience and maybe save some other people some of the wasted time I had when I wanted to build my own solar panels for our house. I’m quite getting a taste for this internet stuff, it’s not as hard as I was led to believe!
Anyway, back to the beginning, sort of. If you’ve read the other posts you know that my wife and I decided we wanted to use solar energy in our house to help save the planet and to save a bit of money as well. The trouble was that the tradition solar panel installations that you see around were just so expensive so that’s why we decided that I should build ours myself.
Now to be honest I don’t know a lot about electricity. It’s always something I thought it best to stay well away from and leave to the experts, after all, there can be pretty dire consequences if you do something wrong! Having said that there was stacks of information available on the internet including a number of guides to building your own solar power installation and the one thing that they all had in common was they said it was easy to build and install your own solar panels.
Now this is where we did have a little bit of a sticky patch because I chose one of these guides and duly paid my small fee for it. Then I sat down and read through it. Yes I’m a bit dull like that, I do like to read manuals before I start using them just in case there are any shortcomings and I get stuck half way through a project. Trust me, it’s happened before. :-)
Anyway, to cut a long story short I found the guide had gaping holes in the information, it didn’t cover where to get some of the bits or mounting the finished solar panels to your house and it really made me wonder if there were other things that had been overlooked. I just didn’t have too much confidence in it. I’ve got to be honest, I did have a bit of a wobble there and thought that maybe all the guides were pretty much the same and perhaps it was a project a bit outside my capabilities but my wife encouraged me to have a look for a better guide and I’m so glad she did.
The guide I used was so easy to follow and covered everything you needed to know
This is a little bigger than our solar power project
Click here for the guide that I used to help me build our solar panels
I should probably admit here that the guide I eventually used was the third one that I bought. The sales pitch is always so good and of course, you don’t know until you’ve read it whether the guide will match up. Well, the one that I eventually used definitely did.
The only minor problem that I had when building the panels was sourcing the solar panel racks to mount the panels on our roof. At first I wasn’t sure which ones I needed because there are a load of different ones. Anyway I went back through the guide again, a bit more slowly (ok, maybe I just missed some stuff first time round, I’m just an old guy!) and sure enough, there was the information I needed.
Well, with the help of the guide we got our panels up just before the end of spring and despite the rubbish summer we’ve had I think they’re fantastic. We’ve saved a shed load of money on our electricity bill and spent a fraction of what it would have cost us to get a company in to install their solar panels.
All in all, I’m chuffed to bits and I heard the wife telling our neighbour how good I was a diy, that was nice to hear.
If you’re thinking of building your own solar panels then check this guide out. It’s really cheap and when you think of the benefits of having your solar panels, cheap electric from a free, sustainable source, you have to do it.
Click here to see the guide to building solar panels that I followed.