• Earth4Energy and Solar Panel Guides are a Scam
• Information is Free On The Internet so Paying is a Scam
• You Get What You Pay For
• Recommending Illegal Advice
• Legitimate Concerns

Earth4Energy and Solar Panel Guides are a Scam

According to this article at a popular solar panel forum, accusations are made against “build your own” solar panel guides you can find on the internet. Namely — one that I promote on this website (Earth4Energy).

Lastly, don’t pay for those DIY Solar Panel Guides you see polluting the Internet, such as Earth4Energy.

The author of this post doesn’t think that the act of building your own solar panel (in and of itself) is a scam. Rather he is implying that there isn’t a single piece of information found in the guides that can be purchased that you can’t otherwise find for free on the internet.

I’m going to throw out the window for a moment the fact that I actually recommend this guide on my website, to be as impartial as possible about all the arguments that anyone is putting forth in this forum thread.

The first argument I have identified in this thread:

Information is Free On The Internet so Paying is a Scam

I’m going to call BS on this one — being as objective as objective can be — this is complete and utter nonsense. Lets abstract ourselves from the topic of “do it yourself solar” for a moment and tackle another similar topic that can let everyone look at this issue objectively. I am a website designer. It is helpful that a website designer knows a programming language called php, along with a database language called mysql.

There is an official website for php. An official manual. Official help files. There are hundreds of free PHP tutorial websites. There are thousands of free examples of how to program PHP on the internet.

That being said, let me make another statement that will show you how ridiculous the argument being put forth in that diy solar panel thread on the forum.

PHP and mySQL can be learned for free on the internet, so buying a book on PHP or mySQL is a scam!

Is it true that simply because you can find everything you need to know about PHP and mySQL on the internet, that all books on learning PHP and mySQL are a scam? Of course not, that’s silly. Just as silly as the similar notion about buying a guide for solar panels. Why is it silly?

• Maybe my time is valuable to me. If someone can save me time by organizing everything I need to know in a convenient book and save me many hours of researching for its “free” equivalent that supposedly already exists on the internet, then the guide will save me time — and time is money.
• How much do you make per hour when you work, Mr. solarpaneltalk.com moderator? Lets assume for a moment that it is $16.66 an hour. That means you have three hours to find everything you need to know about how to build your own solar panel before you are losing money. Earth4Energy has over two hours of video showing everything that needs to be done step-by-step, solar panel diagrams, pictures, lists of materials, everything that is necessary to build your own solar panel.
• Since he is so adamantly against buying solar panel guides that contain information he can “find on the internet for free” — my guess is that he has never even looked at the materials put forth by Earth4Energy.
• “Your better off just coming here to Solar Panel Talk and learn for free.” — He makes this statement as the summary of his “Solar Panel Guides are a Scam” spiel.  I’ve been there — I looked (I recommend that you all go there and you all look).  Some helpful information?  Yes.  Everything you need to build a solar panel?  No.  Not one video, no diagrams, links to other websites showing people who have made their own solar panels with pictures — and while those certainly are inspirational — they don’t tell you how many millimeters you need to space your solar cells apart from each other, or how to solder tabs to solar cells.

In any other area of information, buying a book to learn how to do something is considered standard practice. Why was Solar Panel Talk founded? Most likely to help green enthusiasts to learn how to build solar panels. Hopefully — the website owner and moderators have a goal of educating the public on solar technology to clean the environment and for the betterment of mankind. Except! — if your time is important to you and you don’t have enough of it to scrape the internet for everything you need to know on building your own solar panel, so you want to buy a book – then don’t bother.

There were actually a few good arguments put forth in the thread, and I will get those out of the way near the end — first I wanted to cover all the points I considered ridiculous. To put forth how zealous and ridiculous some idiots can be, read this comment in the thread.

You Get What You Pay For

Are you one of the types who would rather spend your time researching the internet for information on how to build your own solar panel, rather than buy a professionally made guide that explains how to point by point? Hopefully you find some good information. You know the old saying, you get what you pay for. If you go to Google and search for “build your own solar panel”, proudly perched in the top 10 is eHow’s gem of a stinker, literally one of the worst and dangerous guides on the internet on how to make solar panels. By the time you have read their guide over, either you will be lucky and come to the realization that you just lost 10 minutes of your life that you will never get back, or you will be unlucky and be the shame and ridicule of your local home improvement store community as you ask to buy one of them there fancy “DC meters” which operate like a charge controller and an inverter all wrapped up into one (ps that doesn’t exist).

This reminds me of yahoo “answers” … I sometimes go to Google and type a serious question I have about my baby’s fever and at the top of search results are “yahoo answers” filled with a dozen or so unqualified people throwing in crazy, unsafe and unhealthy answers. That’s not what you do when you have a serious issue to contend with — you look for an expert, like a doctor or someone who has spent a serious amount of time, research and money to put together a professional presentation to accomplish exactly what it is you want to do. You’re not going to find that if its free, because you get what you pay for — and there simply isn’t any professional solar panel installer who is going to put a ton of time, energy, effort, create videos, blueprints and diagrams for your do-it-yourself project for free.

Recommending Illegal Advice

This is a quote from someone named GoodDaySolar

IF you pay attention to internet ads, you’ll see a rising multitude of Earth4Energy* scammers posting “Google Adwords” inticements on just about every website after you type the keywords “solar” or “solar panels” or “wind” or “wind power”, etc. They appear to be real because they use real solar or wind information as a cloak to draw in their prey, but the giveaway is “build your own solar panels” or “windmills”. Just buy their PDF in a box first.

Go ahead and click on those ads every time you see them, then move right along to something else (notice the annoying popups and infomercial videos just long enough to get disgusted).

Every single click on their ads makes them pay Google (“pay per click”, or PPC, an SEO or “Search Engine Optimization” term) and distorts their “bounce rate”, another SEO term meaning how long a person stays to look at a website after clicking an ad.

Make scammers pay for running their scams. Each click will cost them around $1-3. The more that REAL SOLAR AND WIND PEOPLE call them on their scam, and make it too expensive to continue; the sooner it’ll dwindle away with other snake oil salepeople we all despise.

This is just classic. This idiot thinks that Earth4Energy is a scam — and he recommends battling it with click fraud, suggesting that every time someone sees one of their ads to click it. I’m fairly certain that is illegal. Can solarpaneltalk.com be held responsible for allowing its members to post recommendations on illegal activities? They moderate posts — in fact I posted to this thread with some objections approximately a month ago and my post was never authorized (it seems you can only post there if they agree with you).

Earth4Energy is not illegal, at worst it is paying money for something you might otherwise find for free elsewhere if you feel like investing the time to do the research yourself. (Unless that free information you found was copyrighted and put there illegally, then you would be doing no better reading that information than you would be downloading music for free on a P2P network).

What solarpaneltalk.com is advocating is illegal, allowing members to recommend click fraud which is illegal.

Legitimate Concerns

A legitimate concern in the that thread is that people who are pushing solar panel guides make it seem too easy. They make it seem like all you do is buy the guide and voila you can slap together a solar panel in an afternoon, piece of cake! Certainly this type of ridiculous marketing sets solar panel guides apart as being a scam?

Obviously I’m being sarcastic — I still get a kick whenever I see the title of this book on learning PHP in 24 hours. But to a certain extent, I will give this thread an ounce of credibility and agree with them that most people who market “solar panel how-to guides” don’t reveal the true cost of installing solar panels upfront. I like to see myself as being different, as you can tell from my website, I try to make the costs of installing solar panels known (not just monetary cost, also investment of time, energy, etc.)

That being said, let me try to dissuade you from buying a solar panel guide by telling you up front what it is going to take for you to have a usable solar panel system:

• You cannot receive a guide and the next day throw together a solar panel from scratch in your garage. It will take some planning, shopping for parts, ordering parts on the internet and waiting for them to arrive.
• You will either need to already have, or to buy some tools. If you do not already own tools, the tools themselves may end up being the most expensive part of your solar panel installation.
• Your homemade solar panels will not qualify for net metering. Net metering is the act of slowing down or reversing the spin of your power meter. It is the act of feeding power back into your grid when you are producing too much energy, so that you can use it during evening hours when you are not producing energy. You cannot do this with homemade solar panels, because they need to be UL listed.
• Your homemade solar panels will be too much of a hassle to qualify for incentives or tax breaks. Whatever the incentives in your area, offered by your local power company, offered by the government — your homemade solar panels will either not qualify for them, or be so much of a hassle to get them to qualify that you won’t do what is necessary to qualify.
• Works great for small solar panel applications — extra expenses for large. Since you are not using net metering, you will need to store your power. The energy will be stored in deep cycle batteries. They are not cheap, in fact they will probably cost more than the solar panel themselves. If you want to power your entire home on solar power — you may in fact need an array of 20 or more deep cycle batteries, costing several thousand dollars. Whereas solar panels may last for 25 years, the batteries do not, expect them to need replacing every 5 years at least.

Have you been convinced not to buy them by reading the above? Good — I hope it prevented you from buying a solar panel guide without knowing fully what you are up against.

That being said, homemade solar panels are still cheaper than professionally installed solar panels, even considering the fact that you won’t qualify for net metering, and you won’t qualify for tax breaks and other incentives. If you already have a tinkering workshop and some decent tools in your garage, have some patience, you understand it isn’t just slapping one together on a Sunday afternoon and it will be a significant investment to see enough energy to provide a financial return — then building your own solar panels makes sense.

I’m going to pull a “solarpaneltalk” on you all! I spent a good amount of time writing this article, but I don’t expect one penny for it. I’m not going to bias this article by posting a link to Earth4Energy, even though I do on other pages of this website. If you’ve read this far — just go to google and search for Earth4Energy, check them out without using my affiliate link.

Psych. I know you all work hard for a living. The last thing in the world I would do is ask you to work for me for free — you have better things to do with your time, and if you were doing it for free then you wouldn’t be doing a very good job of it. This website represents an investment of my time to educate people on the benefits of building your own solar panels. Even non-profit organizations pay their employees wages. If you found the information in this article useful, understand that making a solar panel isn’t just a walk in the park, but you are still intending to buy a solar panel guide if you can find a good one — Earth4Energy is a good one. This is my affiliate link for Earth4Energy.