Recently a couple of us guys went on a guy's weekend out camping. We really needed portable power for our cell phones, between us it was two iPhone, a Blackberry, and two droids. The only way we could really think that we could go out camping was to create our own solar kits, this worked out great we put them in a few water coolers and we were eating jerky by the fire and still had cell phone access, our friend with the EVO even had 4G so we were streaming that all around. After the trip was over I began thinking about solar panels for homes and if I could get them cheaply.
I needed to find out some information about solar panels for homes since the kits we bought worked so well for the guy's weekend; I wanted to see if I could bring this new green trend home. Initial Googling didn't help any, I found out that standard installation by a professional could run me as much as $20,000. While the government rebates cover being more energy efficient, there is no way a $20,000 remodel will ever repay for itself in any time soon, in fact I calculated that even with the government rebates it would take almost 15 years for this professional installation to break even. When I just asked the wife on her opinion about this immediately I got "don't you dare!" So more research about that would have been futile, I needed a way to get solar panels for homes cheaply.
My Google search for a cheap way to go green proved to be very informational, in that it almost can't be done. Still I didn't give up, I even told my buddies about it and since we all were smitten with the green bug, they decided to help me research as well, now it was five computer geeks using Google finding some way to get cheap solar panels for homes. Finally after a month of research we found a few sites that laid out a very useful guide and D.I.Y. plan of attack for making homemade solar panels. While not a handy man myself, we used this opportunity as a way to hang out, so rather than spending the weekend playing Halo and GTA together, we went to my garage, borrowed a few tools here and there from various neighbors and proceeded to follow the guides. Then we found some instructional video as well, these were a great help and we built our first solar panel in a few hours. Well this immediate success soon lead to us building more panels so we could link them all together and build a 1KW system. We got everything setup in two weekends and I can power my home entertainment system, computer with this setup of course we'll be tinkering with it later on since it's just so much fun!