As renewable energy becomes more important throughout the world, many homeowners are becoming interested in using solar energy to power their homes. Solar power is one of the best and most easily accessable sources of clean energy.

Unfortunately, converting that energy into electricity is not free, or sometimes even cheap! Home setups can cost more than $50k for a typical home. Just the kit to construct panels yourself can run upwards of $5k. However, it is not too difficult–or expensive–to build your own.

I know what you’re going to say… “But Sam, I’m not handy! I don’t know nothin’ about buildin’ no solar panels!” Well, I’m with you there, brutha. I didn’t either. However, through a lot of trial and error I was able to figure it out. And I got a “little help from my friends” as they say.

Building panels yourself will save you a TON of money, which means a quicker payback. Even if you can’t generate enough energy to run your entire home, it will help decrease your electricity bill which will help. Let’s say you spend $300 on building your panels and getting your system set up. If you can save even $50/month in energy bills, you’ve paid for this thing in six months! After that, its all gravy!

Now, if you went off and paid $30k for a setup and if it saves you double what the home-made setup saves, or $100/month, you’re looking at 300 months, or 25 years. Your home will be paid off before that happens!

If you are serious about using solar power, you should think about building your own panels.

If you are not serious about solar power, you should also think about building your own to see how it goes.

When I first started wanting to install solar power panels a few years ago, I scoured the internet for instructions, kits, knowledge, etc. I found some things that were partially helpful, and I found a lot of people who just wanted to take my money.

Look, I’m not exactly “Joe Rolling in the Money” here. I’m a supervisor at a paper plant outside Denver and I’m struggling to make ends meet, just like the next guy. I have liked the “idea” of a solar home for a lot of years now, but I just wasn’t able to do much about it. It always remained out of reach, cost-wise.

Fortunately, an Army buddy who lives on the other side of town told me about his experience. He was over for some BBQ last summer and told me about how he was able to get his entire system up and running for about $500. He said he bought an e-book that explained it all. I said, “What the h#!!’s an ‘ebook’?” He told me it was information he bought online and downloaded. I told him all information on the internet should be available for free. He countered that it makes a lot of sense to pay for information, as long as it is useful, relevant and accurate, which this was. He figured you could collect much of the info yourself by doing months of research online and offline and put it together yourself. However, he wanted to get the info and get to work already.

But I digress.

The site he told me about was Earth 4 Energy, and he was really happy with it. I continued to futz around and didn’t purchase it (yeah, like $50 is soooo much money!) for a while. It turns out there are a variety of products that are similar. I started looking into these in depth and have written up some reviews that you can read right here.

They are all basically solid, but my favorite has been Earth4Energy. Read my review to find out why.

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