It's solar powered!

Back in early January, I decided to try something. With some Christmas money burning a hole in my pocket, and a sale on at Canadian Tire, I purchased a solar panel. 15 Watts. Just enough to give the illusion of being useful.

After buying a few other goodies, because it's never as simple as just buying a solar panel, and some negotiations with The Wife regarding location, I set it up in my living room window. So now when ever the sun is up, I am charging a gel-cell 12 volt battery. Great. Now what.

Good question. There isn't enough power there to really do anything useful, so now that the money is spent, what am I going to do with it? It's a good source of 12 volts, you know, like a cigarette lighter in your car. I dug out my car charger for my cell phone, and whiz bang, I now have a solar powered cell phone.

So for the better part of the last 6 months, (and not counting a few trips away from home) I've been charging my cell phone with solar power. Does it make any difference? Nope. More of a novelty than anything. Am I saving any money? Let's see, $99 for the panel, $30 for the charge controller, and another $20 for the gel-cell battery, there's $149, not counting tax, and all the bits and pieces of wire and clips that I had lying about to finish the deal. I'm figuring the phone uses about 1 watt/hour to charge. At $.10 Kilo-Watt/Hour, it's going to take about 1.5 million hours of charging time to pay back my investment. It would look as though I'm in this for the long term.

So why do it? Again, I'll admit the novelty. Second, I have not been impressed with the current level of consumer grade PV technology available on the market. (PV = Photo Voltaic= solar panel) The price for what you get back does not make it worth it, in my mind. Current solar panels are between 10 to 15% efficient. Having said that, there is a great deal of work to improve that. The University of Alberta is said to be working on a panel that, among other things, is said to be over 30% efficient. May not sound that great, but if you think of what people are doing with solar panels now, double it. (Besides charging cell phones)

Now after that long winded, go nowhere, tangential answer, I'll go back to the original question, why do it? Education. I believe that if I have a better basic understanding of the technology at this point, when the technology improves to a more useful level, I may be able to do much more with it. Today it's a mobile phone, tomorrow, a computer, or TV, or who knows......

So go ahead and call me. It's solar powered.