MakeHeat

Need a mercury free thermostat for your solar air heater?  Here’s one of the least expensive one’s we’ve found so far…

RK120EAG Dayton Thermostat Hardwired for your Convenience

This DIY’er walks you through his trials, tribulations, failures and successes in a down to earth, plain English fashion that is a great read.  Plenty of pics to show you what he’s done, and inspires the inventor/hacker (in the best sense of the word)/DIY’er in all of us.

“… To my opinion solar panels are very expensive. A panel of 100 Wp (Watt peak) costs around 400 Euro. I do not know the exact price but it will not be much lower and that is too expensive. This is a rough calculations (based upon dutch electricity prices) and will without a doubt be far from the truth, but still: 100 wp is about 80 kWh on an annual basis (a little less I think, but ok). This is with an energy price of 20 Euro cents about 16 Euro per year. So that would be 400/16 = about 25 year. Which would be too long for the lifespan of the panel (without maintenance). This is only the price of a panel. In addition an inverter is needed. This inverter will return the collected energie back into the electricity grid. Converters have different prices, and range from approximately 50 to 75 Euro per 100Wp. Also you’ll need some installation and mounting materials. Let it then be done by a “professional” and a price of 500 Euro per Wp is not unusual and then you would have a cheap installation. Note: these are all dutch prices. …”

Get inspired and read about his projects (three to date)!

Solar energy (panel) (DIY) – Main.

This is a DIY for a battery backup type solar system, not a grid-tied system (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Including some scathing remarks of ebooks available online, they go through step-by-step solar panel creation using common household tools and sources of solar cells.

“… This website has been created to present the information I have learned from building my own solar panels. Using common household materials and tools, I was able to build quality panels as durable and efficient as commercially bought panels. Altogether the panels cost less than cheap panels of comparable wattage and I fully expect a long life from them. …“

They may be affiliated with the ebay seller, they may not.  It gives you a lot of good information, and if you can find the solar cells cheaper elsewhere, you’re not bound by any agreements to purchase from the links on their site.  Read! Learn!  MAKE!

homeDIYsolar.com – Home .

Green roofs are the rage, but green walls are up and coming.  ”…The benefits of green walls are not only for aesthetics’ sake, but can also provide shade and cooling for solar heating.  Over time there has emerged a number of products for green walls – some consist of simple trays hanging with soil and others work with hanging textiles (nonwoven, etc.).  I will not evaluate these methods, but only describe the basic technique in my proposal for a vertical planting technique. …”

Greenroofs.com: In the Shadow of the Vertical Garden, By Lars Kronborg Bak.

Simple Room Heating, Cheap Sun Tracker, Junkyard Windmills

Simple Solar Heater from Plastic
$15 Solar Tracker
Junkyard Windmill”

Here are some ideas for the DIY’ers.  Just got some good weather and ran my solar air heater, it’s bringing the temperature up 40 degrees from the room temp (65 in – 105 out), though I still have some air leaks that I have to take care of, so I plug it manually at night.  Can’t figure where the air is infiltrating, and hate the idea of removing it from the house again, but no good deed goes unpunished.

7 Solar Water Heating System Designs by Michael Hackleman Issue #65.

This is a great DIY. It’s green, you can use it to heat (or cool), or water your garden. It’s cheap, green, uses recycled parts – or you can buy shiny new ones if you’d like, I’ve got an itch to go build something to take the water from my cellar (yes, they dug below the waterline – musta been a drought in ’59) and use it to water the garden, make a fountain, cool the house…

“…last season, it hammered over 145,600 gallons of pond water up to our garden over 700 feet away and over 100 feet higher than the pond! In the process, it saved us over 485 liters of diesel fuel we would have normally used to drive our diesel tractor to pump and tow the water around our farm.

The pump was built for about $50 worth of plumbing parts and a bunch of stuff that I had sitting in my scrap pile.
World’s Greenest WATER PUMP.