Inexpensive DIY Solar Power - The $600 Kit

We all know that outfitting a house with solar panels is not cheap right now. Harnessing enough sun to be able to live completely off-grid costs many thousands of dollars, up to many tens of thousands depending on how much electricity is needed. But do we really need to go from 0% to 100% clean energy in one go? That's not usually the way things are done; we usually do incremental changes. The idealist will say that it's not fast enough (and might be right), but the realist will say that the mainstream has more chances of going for it if it's not too radical and expensive, and that the power of numbers is hard to deny. So the question is: Do we really need to go 100% solar at once? What is the least you could pay and still end up with enough solar juice to run some things around the house? The Off-Grid weblog answers that question.

Update: How to Make Inexpensive DIY Home-Built Solar Panels with Damaged Solar Cells from Ebay

For $600, you could get yourself enough solar power each week (about 1KWh) to:

run a 20-inch tv for 20 hours, a portable stereo for 100 hours, a laptop computer for 40 hours, or a 12-watt compact-fluorescent light bulb for 80 hours.
The 800-watt inverter (with a 2,000-watt surge capacity) will run a small vacuum cleaner, a drill or a small drill press, a sander, a jigsaw or small band saw, but not a large circular saw. It will handle many toasters and coffee makers, but not all. A blender would be child’s play for this inverter, a microwave an impossibility. A hair dryer on low, yes; on high, forget it.

Here's what the "$600 kit" consists of:

One Uni-Solar 32-watt amorphous-silicon PV module, 12 volts: $180.00
One Morningstar 6-amp charge controller, 12 volts: $40.00

Two Deka 92 amp-hour sealed batteries, 12 volts: ($130.00 each) $260.00

One Aims 800-watt modified sine wave inverter, 12 volts: $65.00

TOTAL: $545.00

This leaves you with $55 for wire, battery cables, mounting hardware, fuses between components, and the miscellaneous odds and ends that are always needed for any project of moderate complexity.