If you’re interested in ‘going green’, solar panels might be exactly the way to do it.

People oftentimes don’t get into solar panels because they think they won’t be able to make it work in the end. Lets say you are going to just charge up a 12 volt battery with a 12 volt solar panel. How would you go about doing that?

You can buy a 12 volt panel on Amazon.com, real cheap. A 5Watt 12 Volt Solar panel goes for about $60. Wattage equation is P = EI, where P is Watts, E is Volts and I is current. Therefore, to determine how much current in amps that 5 watt panel will give you, I = P/E or 5/12 = 416 milliamps. In reality, it will probably provide around 300 milliamps of current. It’s best to get a panel that supplies an amp of current to charge a 12 volt battery fast enough. That would mean you purchase a 12 or 15 Watt panel. A 10 Watt panel would give you 830 milliamps, or .83 amps to charge your battery, which isn’t bad. You could go green for as little as $35.

Make sure, if you’re going to mount it outdoors, that it’s sealed in silicon and ready to be mounted outdoors. If you’re just going to set it out yourself in the yard, then it doen’t need to be properly sealed for ourdoors use. Also, you can build your own glass enclosure, using silicon to seal it like an aquarium.

The kind of 12 volt battery that you’d need to purchase is the kind you get at a Marine Equipment store. They always have what are called ‘Deep Cycling batteries which can be charged up to 100 times without losing their ability to take a charge. You can also buy batteries like that at any Pep Boys, Sears, or Target store. The absolute best ones to use, though, are Marine Batteries that are called ‘Glass Mat’ batteries. They cost around $150 for a large 12 volt battery, but they’re worth it in the end. So, if you are going to go green and you want to store that 12 volt energy, you’ll need a deep cycle or glass mat battery.

Second thing you’ll need, if the panel doesn’t already have one built-in, is a Schottky Blocking Diode, which range around $3. Just look up Solar Panel Schottky Blocking Diode in Google and you’ll find them. Try not to get one which has a current capacity that’s way bigger than you actually need. Double your needs. If your solar panel is rated at 12 volts at 500 millamps, 500 milliamps is half an amp. Multiply that by four and get a 2 amp Schottky diode. The more current that flows through the diode, the more the diode will heat up. You can screw the diode through it’s hole to a piece of metal to radiate heat if it’s heating up too much. If you want to not have to pay an arm-and-a-leg by purchasing a full-blown Charge Controller, a schottky diode will let you go green for only $3.00. However, you generally have to ensure that the battery voltage that’s coming from the solar panel is less than 14 volts.

So, instead of worrying about which schottky diode you’ll need, If you purchase a Sunguard 4.5 Amp Solar Charge Controller for $30, it has the blocking diode built-in that will allow a battery to be charged up without the battery discharging through the solar panel at night. Also, it will ensure that the 12 volt output from the solar panel doesn’t go above the 14 volts the battery needs to charge. The Solar Charge Controller has an instruction booklet that comes with it, so you can’t go wrong.