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How to Get Cheap Solar Power

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Unleash the power of free and cheap solar energy and get your family off the grid with these 14 solar-themed Instructables. Learn how to make your own solar panels for less, build a solar over, solar powered phone charger and much much more!

Instructables is the most popular project-sharing community on the Internet. We provide easy publishing tools to enable passionate, creative people like you to share their most innovative projects, recipes, skills, and ideas. Instructables has over 40,000 projects covering all subjects, including crafts, art, electronics, kids, home improvement, pets, outdoors, reuse, bikes, cars, robotics, food, decorating, woodworking, costuming, games, and more. Check it out today!

Laura Khalil
Editor, Instructables.com

Home Made Solar Panel by Home Build Solar System

Free, green, solar dehydrator by lwilky

SOLAR OVEN by sdbigguy

Portable Solar Generator on a bike trailer for Burning Man by veggiecycle

Solar Food Dehydrator (Dryer) by Permaculture

S.P.R.E.E. (Solar Photovoltaic Renewable Electron Encapsu… by charlitron

DIY Solar Panel by giladlotan

How I built a folding 15 Watt Solar Panel by mdavis19

Almost Free Solar Hot Air Collector by ecosteve

How to MAKE PV Solar Panels by VIRON

How I built a Solar iPhone Charger for under $50. by akbrennan

Make a high powered solar panel from broken solar cells by mattfelice

Solar phone charging system featuring sun tracking by h2osteam

DIY Solar USB Charger - Altoids by JoshuaZimmerman

19 comments

May 16, 2012. 1:05 PMktahreem says:

(removed by author or community request)

Apr 19, 2012. 3:35 PMamirhemat says:

i whant do it
but its very difficult

Mar 18, 2012. 3:29 PMsibnarayon says:

i also faced same problem,can not download this by firefox

Nov 4, 2011. 9:30 AMadityaganeshaiah says:

how to download the books? i cant see the download button or icon. can any body help

Jan 8, 2012. 6:12 AMstevewyburn says:

Hi adityaganeshaiah, to download the project instructions you click on the PDF icon (in the series of steps at the top of each project page). This will open the PDF version, and just click on save to download it to your device, for off-line reading. Good Luck.
SteveUK

Sep 20, 2011. 12:45 AMlimuel says:

how to make solar battery charger possible for 24V?

Oct 27, 2011. 11:32 AM

oanderson says:

If the solar panel outputs 12 volts then I don't think that you should charge a 24v battery with it. I made a 12 volt panel with a home made charge controller and it doesn't let the voltage go below a certain voltage. I followed instructions fromhttp://mdpub.com/555Controller/ and the solar panel is also made from this website.

Oct 14, 2011. 10:12 AMBrainchigger1 says:

Downloaded the e-book with no problems. Some of projects looked quite complicated, gona have to study on them. There is a lot of good information in there, for my little cabin in the woods.......no $3000 grid hookup for me. Thanks to all the DIY folks who put all this together. Wait a minute, that's my job.

Sep 19, 2011. 2:11 AMchelseateam says:

great

chelsea

Aug 26, 2011. 3:48 AMDiscoInferno says:

Using solar power is good for earth.

Sep 14, 2011. 5:32 AMVoid Schism says:

http://tinyurl.com/3xpse2d

Aug 28, 2011. 7:36 PMyxjjyyxj says:

good

Aug 15, 2011. 1:52 AMtemper says:

Ok, what's going on here? there's a button that says "download the eBook" and when you press it nothing happens except it takes you to a page where you can browse other eBooks with nothing to indicate how to download *this* eBook. So what's the deal here??

Aug 15, 2011. 8:29 AMMonsterguy says:

I think that was probably a fault when you tried, it takes me straight to the download page for this ebook when I click.

Aug 17, 2011. 2:31 AMtemper says:

Thanks, Monsterguy,

I am not sure what happened to my previous reply to this comment, but as I said there the problem remains for me, could it be a pro membership or locality thing?

Aug 23, 2011. 12:06 PM

gtoal says:

No, it's a browser thing. i have IE and Firefox side by side, and on IE I just see "View Instructables" but on Firefox there are two extra buttons, "Download PDF" and "Download ePub".

Broken HTML I'm afraid.

You can probably guess the download URLs for most ebooks because they all look like this:

/pdf/How-to-Get-Cheap-Solar-Power/How-to-Get-Cheap-Solar-Power.pdf

and

/pdf/How-to-Get-Cheap-Solar-Power/How-to-Get-Cheap-Solar-Power.epub

Just get the main part of the string from the URL of the ebook page, eg

/id/How-to-Get-Cheap-Solar-Power/?download=ebook

(I've left the site part off so that the software at Instructables doesn't mangle the strings that I pasted in)

G

Aug 23, 2011. 4:52 PMtemper says:

Thanks gtoal, I actually use Firefox, but I did try IE and got the same results (i.e. no pdf OR ePub), however, your post prompted me to try Opera (yes, I have found that it is necessary to use all three) and bingo! it works. I am using Firefox 6.0 (the latest) are you? (for interests sake).

Anyway, thanks very much for that it has led me to a solution and that's the main thing.

Gary.

Aug 25, 2011. 7:48 PMloki2012 says:

Same problems, using Firefox. Reading this post helped, I used Google Chrome, and it worked. Thanks Guys!!

Aug 12, 2011. 10:58 PMnutsandbolts_64 says:

(2 years ago) SOLAR POWER! SOLAR POWER! SOLAR POWER! *discovers I'm not old enough to do the more complicated builds* awww... (today) WHOA, WHAT IS THIS?