• How to Solder Solar Cells
• Cutting Solar Panel Tab Wires
• Soldering Tabs to Solar Cells
• Calculating the Tabbing Further Explained

How to Solder Solar Cells

Without a doubt, the cheapest way to reduce your power bill using solar power is to build your own solar panels.  Why wouldn’t you do it?  One reason for people being unwilling to make their own homemade solar panels is that they think they do not have the technical skill necessary.  Perhaps you are questioning whether you have the ability to make your own solar panels.

There are many steps to making your own solar panels — some are rather easy and some are more complex.  For instance, something easy — building the casing is pretty simple and straight forward.  Something complex?  Soldering the solar cells.

Soldering the solar cells is probably the most difficult aspect of a homemade solar panel.  If you can solder solar cells — you can build your own solar panels.  So I decided to make an article and show a set of videos to show you just how easy it is to solder solar cells.

We want to show you how to build a solar panel that costs less than $1 per watt when completed.  One way of getting the cost very low is obtaining the solar cells for your project.  There are a variety of sources where you can pick up low cost, blemished, chipped and otherwise imperfect solar cells.  Often times, these chipped or imperfect solar cells are mixed in with a lot of perfectly good new ones.  When buying solar cells in a lot like this, they can be obtained for a fraction of the cost of those that are brand new.

Sometimes when you get these solar cells, they will already have the tabs on them (the metal wire that connects each solar cell to each other).  However — some of the most cheap options involves solar cells that do not have tabs yet soldered to the solar cell.

Cutting Solar Panel Tab Wires

What are tab wires?  Each solar cell has to connect to each other, passing along the electricity they generate.  Here are the stats of the solar cells involved in this tutorial:

• .2 mm thick
• 81 mm high
• 150 mm wide

We will be cutting tabs that are 155 cm long each. Why 155 cm? The solar cell is 81 mm in height. We will be soldering 2 of them together along the “height”. The height being 81 cm — that x2 is 162 cm. However, you need a little space between them, we will space them 5 cm apart, which makes the total length 167 cm (162 cm + 5 cm). The total height of the two solar cells soldered together will be 167 cm. However, the way these solar cells are constructed, the wire tabs do not have to reach the entire 167 cm height — where the wire connects to the solar cells there is a border on each edge. Technically, 150 cm would be sufficient for connecting the solar cells, but we will make it slightly larger just to make certain. (Watching the videos below will have this make perfect sense). First things first though, how do we cut a bunch of wire tabs 155 cm in length in the most efficient way?

As we show above, there is an easy trick you can use to cut every wiring tab exactly 155 cm long. We take two pieces of corrugated cardboard. We cut the corrugated cardboard 71 cm high. 71 x 2 = 142 cm. The corrugated cardboard are 3 cm each (and there are 2 of them). That is 6 cm extra on the top and 6 cm extra on the bottom — 142 + 12 = nearly 155 cm. Once we have these two pieces of cardboard next to each other, we take the tab wiring and wrap it around the cardboard over and over again. At the end, we will take a piece of scissors and wedge the tip of them between the two pieces of cardboard, and cut the wiring down the length of the edge. Once finished, you have many pieces of wiring tab all the exact same correct length of 155 cm.

Soldering Tabs to Solar Cells

Continuing the video from above, it is time to begin soldering the solar cells. Beginning with a type of solder that has a low melting temperature. You may want to pick up a light adhesive glue gun to keep the tab on the solar cell while you solder it, so the tab does not move as you run the soldering gun over it. Next, dip the solder gun into the rosin flux, and then glide the solder gun down the length of the wiring tab. Doing this permanently attaches the tabbing wire to the solar panel. See how to do this in the video below.

Calculating the Tabbing Further Explained

I mentioned above that the length of the tabbing is 155 cm long. The height of two solar cells of 81 cm each + 5 mm gap = 167 cm. Of course, you could cut the tabbing 167 cm, but it would be a little wasteful, as the contacts on the solar cells have a border on the edges that do not conduct or pass energy to the tabbing. On a 36 cell solar panel, with 2 tabs per cell, that is 72 tabs you will need to cut. By saving 12 cm per tab that is really unnecessary, you are saving 864 cm per solar panel — that is saving nearly a full meter of wiring per solar panel (a full meter is of course 1000 cm). This is further explained in this video:

That wasn’t so hard was it? If you could follow this little example, our guide on how to build your own solar panel is far more in-depth. We offer over two hours of video, not to mention color diagrams, wiring plans and other simple step-by-step instructions. We show you where to find cheap solar cells and all the other tools and parts necessary to make a homemade solar panel. Click on the link below to receive our guide materials.

Click Below for More Details!