How to Make Heating Solar Panels

:: Heating solar panels made with 180 soda cans ::

How to Make Your Own Solar Panels

You can see I am on a greenhouse / gardening – kick. And so I followed Daniel Strohl from Hemmings.com, who made this solar panel out of need for heating. He wanted to tinker in his garage but it was too cold in Winter. So, he created his own heating system. After 3 years of refining his solar heating project, here it is:

 

I love Daniels’ practical approach of just finding a key element and then adjusting all the other elements to match. For this version of his solar panel, he found an old glass sliding door, and then used that as his measuring stick for all the other materials. He cut his 2×4’s and back plywood to that size for the box, and just filled it up with cans, with turned out are 180.

 

Panel Effectiveness: How Much Heat Does it Produce?

Daniel recorded temperature differentials up to 120 degrees in full sun and up to about 80 degrees in a mixture of sun and clouds.  Not enough to boil water (almost), but sure enough to heat up a garage, greenhouse or garden guest house.

 

source: Daniel Strohl who writes for Hemmings.com, yes, that funky car site!  You can find the full details of how to make heating solar panels on his site.

 

Buy Solar Panels Online

Perhaps making your own is not going to be your thing. To get into solar power quickly and professionally, you can buy simple solar power panels for home as well as complete solar systems online such as this one:


ECO-WORTHY 1200W Grid Tie Monocrystalline Solar Panel Kit. It comes with everything you need: 1200W MPPT Function Waterproof Grid-Tie Micro Power Inverter + 8pcs 160W Mono-crystalline Solar Panels, plus expert advice & instruction. Have a look. Perhaps not as ‘fun’ as playing with soda cans, but much, much more likely to get you the energy results you’re after.