Solar Panels Explained

Solar Panel Systems For Home

It's not magic or something coming from the mysteries of beyond. It's also not science fiction from space. It is just good old fashion science mixed with what the sun already gives to us for free! We have simply learned an efficient way of capturing that energy, just like we found out a long time ago how to harness fire. It was already there for us.

You Need Sunlight

The first ingredient that is needed is sunlight. When this strikes your solar panels, they activate what are called photovoltaic cells. Photovoltaic is the fancy way of saying any item that converts sunlight into energy. Each of these cells is made up of two pieces of silicon since silicon is a great cheap semi-conductive material. Now that we have a way to capture the energy, we need to be able to produce electricity from it.

Energy Field Formation

For those of you who loved their high school chemistry lessons, one of the items we learned was that those elements that occur naturally in nature, most of them can have some form of charge based on the number of electrons they have which we call ions. Simply put there are some elements that can have more electrons than they need which we call negative ions and some elements that can have fewer electrons, which we call positive ions. What solar panel manufacturers do is take the top silicon slices and coat them with elements that will have negative ions (usually Phosphorous). Then they take the bottom silicon slices and coat those with an element that will have positive ions (such as Boron). With this, we have produced our energy field sandwich. Once you add the meat inside, which is the sunlight (photon for the amateur scientists in all of us), that sunlight will knock out one of those electrons like a loose tooth falling out of one's mouth and poof, energy is made.

Final Steps

Almost, unfortunately, we now need to convert the energy. This type of energy we're producing is called direct current (DC) electricity, and we really can't use that energy to power your home properly. We need to convert it into alternating current (AC) electricity. This is very old technology and has been resolved a long time ago with the creation of a power inverter. Solar panels themselves will have the inverter for each solar panel or one major one from the battery that is storing all the energy. It then produces perfectly safe to use electricity straight to your outlets. You can feel free to add specialized meters on top of the electrical meter provided by the power company that will help you gauge how much electricity you are producing vs using. This is a great tool if you are considering going completely off the main grid and fully powering your home. With a little bit of modern science, we are able to take what the sun already gives us, and use it to power our homes and vehicles (in some cases). As each year goes by, many solar panel manufacturers are fully focused on the efficiency and durability of these panels to make sure you have something extremely durable that can harness the real and full potential that our sun provides us.