Hey there, so glad I found this forum!
I’m part of a warehouse of artists and small creative businesses that is off the grid in the middle of San Francisco. Yes, you read that right.
We’re occupying a building where the wiring was stolen and so we’re operating with a gas generator.
We just started to get a battery array setup going so that we can be charging the batteries with the generator and minimizing our fossil-fuel usage (see my other post about that). We’re also going to be getting some solar panels going as soon as we can.
Our goal is eventually to be running completely off of solar power, which means we need a pretty beefy system as we’re talking about an 8000sf building here with power usage sometimes at 5-6kw (though usually under 1kw)
My questions here are regarding building our own solar panels.
We may be acquiring some old solar hot water heater panels. Not much use in their current form but I’m hoping we can use the materials to build PV solar panels: they are made with copper sheeting, so it means we’re getting 150sf of copper sheeting. I’ve been trying to find instructions somewhere on the construction of PV cells using copper sheeting and have only been able to find instructions for very small cells that aren’t much use.
Is building large PV cells using copper sheeting still a viable and efficient method? Can anyone point me in the direction of some good instructions?
Thanks!