Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

free solar panels

Status
Not open for further replies.
Yeah right. I'll be sure to put those free solar panels on the lovely 3 bedroom house I bought free and clear for only $673 using the techniques I bought in a course seen in a late-night infomercial.
 
If this claim is true (it probably was at the time he wrote the book) he still only needs to sell about a thousand books before the supply is all spoken for. It's also likely that when people start asking for them, they'll start charging.

Are you willing to bet $12.95 that he hasn't sold those thousand books yet?
 
The book says,
Buy some solar panels and then recoup your money by selling a book called "How to get solar panels for free".

Mike.
 
how to make a million dollars:
write a book entitled "how to make a million dollars" make it look good and have a big public release...
 
This guy has been on Ebay for years trying to sell this book .Apparently it isn't going as good as he claims LOL. Really how many free solar panels are out there .He also had one about getting free sheets of glass for building solar passive heating.
 
free glass?

Hey, free glass is easy, just go to the beach and waite for a lightening strike, when the lightening hits it melts the sand, and you have glass. Scoop it up before it solidifies, dump it on top of a tank of molten tin,keep it warm , the glass will float and spread out into a sheet, then slide it off the tin and support it while it cools so it stays flat, trim to shape. Voila... free glass. Maybe I could sell a book....
 
phantomroller said:
waite for a lightening strike...
Yep, and something tells me that you won't be getting any free glass anytime soon!
 
Maybe he should give away his book and DVD for free then try to sell you the stuff he gets for free.
 
Real Estate Courses

Oznog said:
Yeah right. I'll be sure to put those free solar panels on the lovely 3 bedroom house I bought free and clear for only $673 using the techniques I bought in a course seen in a late-night infomercial.

Gee, I always wondered if those courses actually worked....

hehehehehe...

But, to get back to a semblence of the topic...

How is it that a company can manufacture a DVD player (all the plastic molding, every screw and other hardware, connectors (including an optical interface), precision motors, the ciruit board (fully populated), the wiring harness, a friggin' LASER (for goodness sake), a lens and tracking system, the switches, and a display panel) and then include a remote control, batteries and a set of audio cables, assemble, test, box, ship it halfway around the world and retail it for US$30...and make a profit. But, they can't figure out how to grow or paint photovoltaic materials onto a substrate and connect it up to output the power and make it economically feasable. At least the basic process of converting light to electricity is something that's been done as long as photo light meters have been around (what? Like 75+ years?).
 
crashsite said:
How is it that a company can manufacture a DVD player...

Semiconductors are expensive to produce. Cheap DVD players exist because they use very small amount of semiconductor material. Photovoltaics use a lot. Calculator solar panel uses more silicon than a Pentium processor.
 
Yes that is true, Photovaltic cells use rare and sometimes dangerous elements (cadmium, Germanium, gallium) to get the effect needed, so then they have to pay the feds or whatever the fines for using it.
 
Economies of Scale

felis said:
Calculator solar panel uses more silicon than a Pentium processor.

...and yet I can buy a calculator at the Dollar Tree for a buck and my computer costs hundreds. Go figure.

Where are the economies of scale in the solar panel world? That's the secret to the DVD player. If you make a bunch of them you can afford to expensively tool up and then produce with a small per-unit price (and, it doesn't hurt to have cheap foreign labor).

I kind of don't buy the argument about the toxic materials. Certainly, none of them are "created" in the process of making solar panels. The relative concentrations of them merely change. Now, if the stuff like cadmium and arsenic, etc. were to get "used up" or "sloughed off" during the life of the cell, it would be an environmental concern. But, if the overall manufacturing process includes the recycling and re-use of the materials when making new cells, it seems like most of the work of collecting the raw materials has already been done and you'd just need to re-purify them. For example, if cadmium is needed, it wouldn't make sense to dump any of it back into the environment at any step in the process.

I'm no chemist but, I find it difficult to believe that people who are haven't figured this one out.
 
Back on the topic of cheap solar panels - I found it very cost-effective to buy broken cells from solar installers and then solder it back together. I'm getting 50-70 cents per watt easily. The density is not that good but for this price who cares.
 
felis said:
Economies of scale won't apply here. Bulk material (i.e. high-purity silicon) is expensive - if your product uses a lot of silicon it's going to be expensive as well.

I have trouble believing this. If you can make a furnace in which you can produce some quantity of pure enough silicon, at minimum, you can make 10,000 furnaces, operating in parallel. You can also make them bigger and develop ways for providing continuous output.

I'm reminded of steel. Steel used to be expensive and difficult to make. Iron was easy but, the minute you added the desirable imputities and heated it up, any oxygen would oxydize the result and ruin the steel. In fact, steel was so valuable, cutting tools were often iron (for heft and support) with a strip of steel welded to the cutting edge. With the advent of the Bessemer process, that allowed high quality steel to be continuously produced, steel became cheap and readily available.

My point is that I can't seriously beleive that an abundant material (I've read that silicon is the most abundant element in the earth's crust...but, whether that's true or not, it's pretty abundant and easy to gather), can't be more economically purified using techniques commonly used to improve economies of scale (larger facilities, parallel processing and continuous production).
 
Maybe it's hard for the government to invest on something they would have a tough time taxing.
Lets say we all had efficent solar homes and used them to recharge our cars. That's a pretty big tax dollar loss.
 
blueroomelectronics said:
Maybe it's hard for the government to invest on something they would have a tough time taxing.
Lets say we all had efficent solar homes and used them to recharge our cars. That's a pretty big tax dollar loss.

You seriously think the government would be at a loss as to what else to tax us on if they lost their gasoline/diesel tax revenue? You must be a more trusting gentleman than I am!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top