The most important ingredient of your free panel is the photo voltaic cells. They are very cheap to buy. They are readily available from places like ebay, usually sold as a brick of mono crystalline wafer-thin slivers.

If you are going to be a purist and stick to totally free, you can peel off the solar cells attached to solar lights. Usually the plastic housing perishes on those things a lot sooner than the cell life expires. Or often the battery in a solar light will die and, like a lot of cheap gadgets, it is not replaceable.

Another method of using free materials is to use broken solar cells. I have seen solar panels made entirely from small pieces of smashed up panel. You don’t need to have a panel made up of perfect little squares for it to work. Your ‘crazy’ panel probably won’t be as efficient but as long as you connect it properly it will work.

This SolarDIY guide shows you how to make solar panels for less than two hundred dollars using new materials and even tells you how you can make the panel from broken cells so that it costs you next to nothing!

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