Most existing guides and resources make the process of solar panel construction far more complicated than it needs to be.
The solar panels are constructed on top of composite fibreglass/divinycel foam panels, which have the advantage of being strong, lightweight, and non-conductive.
Allow the copper to cool slowly once the layer of cupric oxide has formed. It will begin to flake off and may do so with some force as the oxide and the copper cool at different rates.
Scrub the completely cooled copper under running water to remove any last remaining bits of oxide. Be gentle, as you do not want to remove any of the red cuprous oxide that has been created in heating the flashing.
Cut another piece of copper to the same size. Attach both panels using the alligator clips to the inside of the wide-mouth glass jar or plastic bottle with the top cut off. The panels should not touch and should bend to match the curves of the jar or bottle.
It’s best to start small and take it from there try building a simple 40 or 50-cell solar panel first, see how that goes, and then adapt accordingly.
Here’s how you can set up your first solar panel “experiment” to power your Koi fish ponds Pumps:
After that, the panel needs to be marked with 102mm squares. Center the squares on the center holes drilled (assuming they are accurate) by placing the ruler along the left-most row of center holes with the 51mm mark on the center of the first hole and then marking 0, 102, 204, 306, 408, 510, 612. The 0 and 510 or 612 mark should be about 1mm in from the edge. Repeat on the right-most row and then connect the marks using thin lines. Alternatively, you may be able to line the ruler up based on the negative holes which should be centered on the 102mm squares. Also draw thick lines between the corresponding positive and negative connections so that the tabbing lines for each cell are clearly shown. Marking the panel takes about fifteen minutes.
Then, arrange the solar cells in series, face-down, and drop a small amount of solder onto each of these tabs.
Then, wire all these cells together by attaching wire from the back of one cell to the front of another cell, and so on until everything is connected.
Next, connect each individual row together in parallel, and then fix the cells to your plywood using silicone.
No attempt at “air cooling” was made, although some people recommend cutting a large hole out underneath the center of the cell for this purpose – this was considered too fragile for our needs. Since we did not want any drilled holes directly on the edge of the panel, we arranged them as shown which allowed most of the cells to be easily connected together to the next cell in the circuit, but kept the negative contact points on the edge of the cell away from the edge of the panel.
We learned the techniques we used for building these panels from Stewart Clode of Lake Tuggeranong College, based on how they built their Spirit of Canberra solar car, as well as solar cell soldering techniques from Alain Chuzel and would like to very much thank them for their help and credit them with most of the information (and errors are of course mine!).
The solar panels are constructed on top of composite fibreglass/divinycel foam panels, which have the advantage of being strong, lightweight, and non-conductive