Rotten Egg of a Tutorial from eHow

How in the world does eHow.com rank for anything? Somehow they rank top 10 for just about any topic you can think of when it comes to a how-to tutorial. They have a rotton egg of a page explaining how to build your own solar panels.

The person who wrote this article knows absolutely nothing about solar panels. It occurred to me that it would be good to write an article to refute it point-by-point, both to counter this sort of misinformation on the internet, but also because I have another motive for this article which I will outline at the end of this eHow thrashing. Here is the first point of this eHow article …

First things first you need to find yourself a small solar panel that is 12 volts or higher. In this case a 16 volt solar panel will suit your needs the best.

It is pretty easy to find a panel like this and your best bet is to go shopping at a local RV store or even a small marina. You should be able to find one that is priced around or even below $100.

This article isn’t even about building a solar panel. It is about buying a solar panel. It also throws out an irresponsible price-quote of $100 or less. Let me ask a question — eHow did this article get to rank #3 in google when searching for “build your own solar panel” when it is clearly about buying a solar panel? Anyways, there are things to be learned by dissecting this article so I’ll continue.

The article mentions that the solar panel will cost around $100, for a 12 to 16 volt solar panel, without even mentioning how many watts it is. You can have a 15 watt solar panel that is 12 volts, or you can have a 120 watt solar panel that is 12 volts, the only difference being that one produces almost ten times more power than the other — using a $100 price tag on such a generic, wattless (new word, I made it up) “solar panel” that could be any amount of wattage is just as ridiculous as saying you can buy a car for $100, not mentioning whether the car was a matchbox toy or a Ferrari.

So, if you are going to write an article about buying a solar panel (instead of building one), one of the most important factors to reference would be the price. The only price tag in the whole article is the $100 for some random solar panel that you cannot even calculate the cost per watt on, but it fails to mention the cost of other necessary expenditures (and even fails to mention some items that are necessary). The system he is talking about is going to reach about 4 to 5 times the cost as he is referencing in this article. Continuing to point #2 –

The next thing you are going to need is a battery. While you may be tempted to go big or go home on this one, a smaller yet rechargeable battery is your best bet.

A 12 volt lead or acid battery will do the trick. The type you are looking for here is a deep cell cycle (correction mine) battery as they are built the best for constant and continuous use.

Of course the term is deep cycle battery, not deep cell (maybe he confused solar cell with deep cycle battery).  In the first part of point #2 he recommends that smaller is better, and in the second section he recommends a deep cycle battery (the most expensive type, there isn’t anything more expensive and they really don’t have small deep cycles or large deep cycles, there is only one size and its the size of a car battery).

Since his article is really about buying a solar panel, now would have been a good time for him to mention that a deep cycle battery will cost about $125, more than the cost of the solar panel he is recommending. Point #3 …

In order to build your solar panel safely you will also want to purchase a battery box. This will offer protection from the battery and the power it exudes in case you are working in small quarters or have small children running around in the area.

Yeah it sure is a good idea when you are rigging up a dangerous electrical system which will have children playing around, to make certain you build a box around the battery.  Actually, I’d further add that if you are going to have kids playing hide and seek under your solar panels or leapfrog over your battery, you might want to rethink where you are installing this expensive and potentially dangerous-if-tripped-over electrical equipment.  As long as we’re talking about encasing stuff, how about throwing in some details about a more important issue — how will the solar panel be mounted?  On the roof?  The battery needing a box is a no-brainer, a bigger area of concern and cost (mounting the solar panels) is not even discussed in the article.  Point #4 …

The next materials required are a DC meter that matches the voltage of your battery and a DC input. These products will allow you to convert your energy from the panel and apply them to power sources around your home. Of course if you are hoping to power AC appliances you will need an inverter as well.

*Twitch* — *Stifles a Cringe* — folks, a DC meter is simply to measure the amount of power the solar panel is generating, i.e. how many watts it is producing at any given moment.  For heaven’s sake, do NOT use a DC meter to convert your energy from the panel.  I will give the author the benefit of the doubt and say he is most likely talking about a charge controller.  It is hard to say because a charge controller isn’t even in his list of necessary components for the eHow guide.

A charge controller does what he says the DC meter is supposed to be doing, kind of sort of, well not really.  A charge controller evens out the wild power generated by the solar panel into a consistent flow so it doesn’t fry your battery.  It is absolutely needed — but it doesn’t really convert the energy from the panel and apply them to power sources around your home, because the inverter does that.  This was the “OMG I have to write a blog post about this rotten egg” moment when reading this article.  He is trying to meld the concept of DC meter, charge controller and inverter, all into one. Then in the last sentence he references maybe needing an inverter, which means whatever he thought he was talking about before that was not the inverter. Point #5 …

It is now time to actually put the labor into your solar panel. Use a handheld drill to attach your meter and DC input to the top end of the battery box. Next use some insulated wire to connect the meter to the battery.

Be very careful to only work with one wire at a time and connect the first wire to the negative input first. Use the same procedure to connect the DC inlet and the solar panel to the battery itself.

Is this what qualifies the article as a “build your own solar panel” tutorial? A DC Meter isn’t even necessary for your solar panel to operate, it is only necessary if you wish to test how many watts your solar panel is producing, otherwise you put it in a tool drawer and forget about it. Again, assuming he is talking about a charge controller, this would be attached to the solar panel before the current hits the wire, not on the battery. Incidentally, for a system this small a charge controller will run about $50.

It seems to me quite a random thing that he suggests that this is where the elbow grease begins, so-to-speak. Drilling the battery box. Hopefully, people pay close attention to the “box” and the battery is not inside when it is drilled. I hate to think how many battery-acid-splashing-catastrophes potentially might be occurring. Probably none because by the time someone has gotten this far in the tutorial, they will have been laughed at so badly by the RV shop and wherever they were buying parts from that they would have given up on this tutorial long before then and gotten their hands on a real tutorial.

Now you are ready to start converting the sun’s power into your own usable energy. Close the lid tight with a cord and put the entire product out into the sun. Wait for about 8 hours and then get ready to bask in some home made energy.

In reality …

The solar panel was purchased (ok fine, it should work — it wasn’t built it was bought). From the solar panel to the charge controller. From the charge controller to the deep cycle battery. From the deep cycle battery to the inverter. (By the way, inverters are running from $1 per watt for a micro inverter, to 60 cents a watt for a conventional inverter). From the inverter you can power your appliances. Half of what is mentioned above was not mentioned in the article (no reference to solar charger, no costs on anything but a wattless generic solar panel). Assuming the solar panel was 80 watt, you are looking at perhaps $160 for the panel at $2 per watt (that is cheap), $125 for the deep cycle battery (which, if you are buying a solar panel retail, it most likely qualifies for net metering so you might as well just use the local power company to store your power instead of spending money on a deep cycle battery), about $150 for an inverter, plus incidental cords puts this project over $500.

Why Did I Write This Article?

I have put much work into this website, research and writing the various articles available here. It is rather frustrating to do so much to produce such good quality content, only to compete with websites like eHow which produces complete nonsense articles. Adding insult to injury, recently my website has been banned in Google, it cannot be found in the top 1000 results searching for anything. After researching the matter I found dozens of scraper websites stealing my content, or producing splog spammy backlinks to this blog which must have raised some kind of Google red flag. It appears I’m writing for almost no-one now.

Rhetorical question …

How does eHow get away with publishing complete nonsense articles on anything how-to and ranking top 5, while quality websites writing unique, original 1000+ word articles and up getting banned? Pure frustration. I requested a reinclusion with Google and I really hope this article gets read by whoever it is verifying that this is actually a quality website.

Vindication

Today is November 6, 2010. It is exactly 10 days after I posted this article. My website has resurfaced and when I searched for “build your own solar panel” — I came in just above eHow. Maybe Google read the article and decided that this site is better than eHow after all.