Homemade Solar Panel - How Much Does It Cost To Build A Homemade Solar Panel

I would suggest building a solar water heating panel - that's doable with materials at your local hardware store. Crudely, it's a box painted black on the inside, with pipes running through it. You put a glass cover on it to keep the heat in. If you're dead set on experimenting with solar electricity, it's not practical to build a panel with useful output at home. If you shop around, you can find large panels for $4-5 a watt, so a 200-watt panel would be $800 to $1000. Three of those, and you could power a small coffeemaker. But I see prices dropping, so you might want to wait a year. If you just want to play with something, you can get a kit that charges a car battery from Harbor Freight for about $300. It's not much power, though - it will run a compact flourescent bulb for about 20 minutes on a day's charge. I'm not trying to be down on solar - we have panels on our house. But I'm fully aware that they're just barely break-even in cost over their life. Details of our installation below, if you're curious.