Solar House

In this instructable, I'm going to tell you how to make a Solar House. This is my first solar house, I learned how to make it along the way. I will share the steps as well as the mistakes I have made along the way in order to make it as easy as possible for you to make a solar house, however, take everything I say with a grain of salt and If you find any improvements to my design please use and institute them.

Materials/ components:

1. lots of cardboard
2. hot glue sticks
3. solder

Line side:

1. 5' of 16 gauge wire
2. 1 USB cable switch
3. 3 switches
4. 1 USB car charger, (5 volts, 1 amp)
5. 1 two-by-two euro splicer, and 1 Four-by-two euro splicer
6. 1 portable USB phone charger power bank
7. 1 solar panels: 12 volts, 70mAmp
8. 2 solar panels: 12 volts, 40mAmp
9. 1 USB charger cord for the battery

Load side:

1. 2 white LED's
2. 1 resistor
3. 1 fan
4. 1 music speaker

Tools:

1. 1 Wire strippers/cutters
2. 1 Hot glue gun
3. 1 box cutter
4. 1 soldering Iron
5. 1 helping hands for the soldering
6. 1 multimeter

For my design process, I was given some parameters to go off something like 2 square feet, in my opinion, that to big for what I did. My house is on the bigger side feel free to take a lot of time to make a neat and pretty small house, or make a big house where you can easily access the components or something in the middle. I honestly wish I'd made mine more like an actual house but I'm happy with what I made. The house building isn't everything but don't overlook it either. I made a couple of rooms to put the different loads in. I had originally made the house two stories but it turned out to be too big so I kept it on one floor and that turned out to work just fine.

I Used hot glue and cardboard for the structure of my house, and I used a separate sheet of cardboard for the roof which I decided to put my solar panels on.

Making the circuit is the trickiest part of this project.

To make this easiest for yourself mark all your wires positive and negative respectively

For easy organization I recommend putting the wires from the USB switch into the two-by-two euro splitter then from there were two positive wires from the positive port and put them in their own ports of the four-by-four euro splitter, then do the same with the the negative. see the picture above.

I wired the fan and the speaker into the same negative and positive ports and gave them separate switches, there in parallel so they work independently.

I wired the LEDs in series, it doesn't really matter if you use that or parallel but you do need a ( ) resistor so the LEDs don't burn out. I used the other two unused euro splitter ports for the LEDS and I also attached a switch to them.

In comparison here are the Volts and Amps of my loads.

Fan: 2.3 v, 0.3mA

LED's: 2.25v, 22mA

Music: 3.2v, 0.8mA

At first, I only used alligator clamps and electrical tape for all of my connections, That was a mistake please solder all of your connections it makes everything so much easier.

If your circuit works one moment and doesn't the next make sure no wires are touching others they shouldn't, that will short the circuit. In my case, I shorted and destroyed a USB switch and had to redo that.

Wiring the house is as simple as putting your loads where you want to put them and attaching the wires as neatly as you like to the inside of the house, My only suggestion is that you use any other tape than electrical tape if you plan to use tape. Electrical tape used for anything else than wires is crap because its adhesiveness to anything other than itself and especially cardboard is absolutely atrocious.

Don't use hot glue until you're happy with your final design and until your shore everything works, it will minimize demolition.

Make your loads easy to access if you plan to fiddle with them in the future.

When you wire the solar panels it is as easy as connecting all the positive ends together and all the negative ends together, once you have those you disembowel the 5-volt car charger and connect the positive wire from the panels to the little stubby metal thing and the negative wire to the long metal arm, if it doesn't work take the panels out in the sun and mess around with your connections until the power comes through the charger. then you can plug your USB chord from there into your battery.

if you need help finding the -/+ wires of the panels you can use a multi-meter. putt it on v20 and if the number is positive your -/+ is obvious and if the number is negative then your -/+ are switched around

Now, for the fancy stuff, panel tilt angle and azimuth. Tilt angle is when the north is 0 degrees, and the edge of your panel points in the direction that makes the face of the panels get the most access to light it needs. panel azimuth is the angle at which the face of the panel faces the sun. where I made my house the panel azimuth angle was 38 degrees, it changes with geography. Two achieve this in the building you can slant the roof or create stands to meet the requirements.

https://gml.noaa.gov/grad/solcalc/azel.html

copy and paste this in the search bar, this will help you calculate all your angles.

Like I said please innovate try things yourself self and use this if you're confused about anything, I only hope this does not confuse you more.

here is a video for further instruction.