Dead solar panels reuse ideas

I have thoughts, I don't know if they are valid or not, curious if anyone knows more than me on the subject. It seems to me all these solar panels all over the roofs will have a limited lifespan, and are also susceptible to becoming non-functional before that time. What can we do with dead solar panels?

I looked up how they are made, looks like it's a sturdy glass sheet, an electronics panel layer, and a heavy plastic backing sheet, all in a frame.

I am a fan of vertical heat collectors, and any angle hot water collectors. I'm wondering if the electronics layer can be removed, leaving sturdy glass and plastic in a frame that would be easy to mount.

Could you build a greenhouse out of the gutted out panels?

Has anyone torn one apart? Can the electronics layer be removed easily and it reassembled? Are solar panels repairable if they fry the electronics by just swapping in a new layer?

What can we do with dead solar panels?
I'm curious!!!

:D

Hi Pearl,
Solar panels are a laminated sandwich, so it's less like asking if you can take the lettuce out of the BLT, and more like asking "can I just pull out the middle layer of this sheet of plywood?". The photovoltaic active layer is relatively benign as electronics go, mostly silicon, silver, copper. There is a small puck at the wire egress that is truly a circuit board box.

Now, a "used up" solar panel is a relative term. Yes, their performance degrades over time, but until a conduction path corrodes due to a failed seal or something, they will continue to develop DC voltage for a long time. 25yrs to 80% performance is a typical rating, so at 50yrs they will probably still provide meaningful power. But a sealant failure, a crack in the glass, a torn out wire, all these could render a panel useless electrically, and open the door to your sort of inquiry.

Technicalities aside, they are heat collectors, but will be opaque ones. So, thermal collection systems sure could use them, though as a black surface, not a glass sheet. They are a strong weatherproof glass sheet, and could serve as a weather barrier layer. They could have suits and values painted on 52 of them for a giant deck of playing cards (hard to shuffle). Roofing/siding an animal shelter with them might make more sense. However, as long as recycling facilities accept them, I am generally inclined to think that is a good destination. But thinking outside the box is a good thing!

Best,
Mark

They come in a huge array of different sizes, so upcycling as roofing or shed walls will be an interesting tetras experiment. Scoring a large number of identical sizes would help make them more useful.

Recycling facilities may accept them, but are they being shipped elsewhere, or genuinely being recycled in North America? Some "recycling" is actually more energy intensive than upcycling would, so I would need to do more research into the specific product.

I am aware of people buying used panels cheaply and getting enough energy out of them to be useful on a homestead scale if space isn't a premium. If they only produce 50% compared to new, you simply need a lot more of them!

Mark Miner wrote:Hi Pearl,
Solar panels are a laminated sandwich, so it's less like asking if you can take the lettuce out of the BLT, and more like asking "can I just pull out the middle layer of this sheet of plywood?".

Well drat. That's what I was hoping it would be like, pulling out the lettuce.

And some interesting ideas. Thank you :D

I just thought of all the panels I see around here, and how much neat stuff my neighbors throw away, and that at some point there may be a pile of them up for grabs, and what uses could I put them to....

Thank you for food for thought.  :D

I suppose if the plastic can't be removed it will become like a safety glass? So you wouldn't have to worry so much about breakages. I have a feeling that the solar cells are not completely opaque, so you may get a 'shade tunnel' effect which might be useful for structures in a hot climate perhaps.

Yes, they tend to shatter gracefully (if that is possible). I have had wind flip a panel, and while it was ruined for use, there was minimal glass to clean up, most (but not all) stayed laminated. The coverglass is over the silicon layer, and the plastic is behind that, so it's not quite as intimate a glass-to-plastic bond as a windshield.

The UCS has a nice page here with some solar panel construction details. The mass is the glass, the balance of the composition is generally-benign metals and plastic. However, depending on the panel, there can be things like cadmium as the EPA notes.. Any panel that is listed for sale in the EU will by law not have significant toxic metals (due to RoHS regulations). Lead in solder is typical in older panels, but in small amounts.

Anyway, they are a useful tool for power, second life uses are imaginable, but somewhat limited.

Good questions to ask, though!
Best,
Mark

My plan is to make a roof out of them   like a gazebo.    or for a chicken roost.

I would like to make first surface mirrors out of them, but I have not been able to figure out how to make that happen yet.

Idea just hit me.......

The new parabolic solar cooker I have uses a reflective tape ........       One could either put the reflective tape on the solar panel and use it in solar cooking or, use it to reflect light on bi-facial panels in the winter time when it is cool.

Fence material, I suppose.

Andy Ze wrote:Fence material, I suppose.

Maybe raised bed sides? The glass would make them impervious and prevent water evaporation from the soil. Depends on the gick factor and tolerance to that also.

I understand that there are companies that will recyle these dead solar panels.

If folks cant find them then why not make a coffee table out of one?  Cool!

do the solar panels have enough life to do other things like charge batteries for fence chargers?

Or even charge your phone?

Are the panels the right height to use to build a fence?

Maybe use them to build a dog house, a chicken coop or what?

would solar panel make a cool looking greenhouse?

When we lived in Papua New Guinea, the Raskols would steal solar panels and sell them to locals.  We often saw solar panels as tables and walls.  It was easy to get regulators and lights from Australia so there was home lighting.

Panels can be fixed if the wires break. Just a small drill, silver wire and solder to bypass the break.  YouTube has some good information on this.

I did some degradation tables on our solar panels and have similar values to Mark.  Our rate is 0.1% per annum. so, 100%, 99.9%, 99.8%, 99.7  which means in 10 years, our cells will be 98.9% efficient.  Efficiency relies on the type of silicon matrix, construction of the joining material from cell to cell and cleanliness of the glass.  The new wiring is laser cut vertical ribbons so there is less shadow over the photovoltaic silica, unlike the older panels that had wire soldered on top of the silica.  Panels should not wear out in one person's life if purchased new.  The trick is to keep them clean and protect the external wiring from the sun and base your panel capacity on a fine mid-winter's day.  Panels under 25 deg C or over 25 deg C will not perform as well........

As a thought and back to Pearl's suggestion, there is no reason that a greenhouse or room wall cannot be solar panels generating power.  Just make sure that they are tilted the right direction and inclination.  They are also easier to clean than roof mounted ones.  Ours are on dual axis trackers so we can grow sun-sensitive herbs under them because there is light but no direct heat from the sun.
Cheers

This is off topic but just an aside to Paul Fookes, reacting to his line at the bottom about retiring. I think the problem is not retiring but what my friend calls "the curse of competence" referring to my husband, who knows how to do electronic repair and website maintenance, so people are always asking him to fix their computers or their email problem.

I don't have ideas on uses for dead solar panels--except to note that they could be used as roofing, perhaps over other roofing to reflect heat, and thus to collect rainwater. Many homesteads could use a water-collecting roof near a garden.If there isn't already a building there, the question is what other use do you get out of this roof--a garden shed? Or maybe a shade house, with no walls, for plants that can't take full sun? A gazebo for hanging out admiring the pond or the view, protection from sun and rain?

I also want to note that my impression from what I've seen elsewhere, as well as one poster here, is that solar panels should still be producing useful electricity after 50 years--I'm always reading that "they only last 25 years." Panels have gotten MUCH more efficient as well as cheaper over the past 40 years--I wonder how their longevity has changed?

@mark's post was spot on.  That said, I do know of people who have carefully split the "taco" apart and were able to repair a bad solder joint.  That was a *very* long time ago.  Not sure what materials they use these days between the glass and the back-sheet (possibly silicon to adhere the cells to the glass or backing).

If you can get one or more to experiment with, look for ones that do NOT have cracked glass (like someone else pointed out that the soldered connections can get corroded), carefully remove the perimeter seal, and see if you can peal the backing off.  Better yet.  Take an old volt-ohm-meter with you and see if it is still making voltage.  If it IS, then just use a degraded panel for the panel (which others have implied), and maybe do some experimentation with adding coolers to the back (like a heat-pipe, PCM, air, and more).  

Anyway, back to the original question.  Supposedly, some of the old ones were repairable.  Not sure about the new ones.  That said, there is likely a bug push to make things in such a way that they are easily recyclable.  All of this together is just -- get some and find out.

Oh, BTW, I found a recommendation on the net to reach out to some of the local solar installers and see if they have any old used ones, or ones they want to get rid of.  One guy was able to pick up a pallet of 30x (with some broken, but was able to pull 9x out and install on a roof)...

https://www.epa.gov/hw/end-life-solar-panels-regulations-and-management

Some guidance in there.
Everyone’s experience with technology and product safety should support the ideas of :
(1)Taking the manufacturers claims of safety with a grain of salt
(2) Not integrating the panels into direct contact with soil/water until their safety is proven.

I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade here, and I have had posts removed for trying to advise caution over hope in sensitive matters- but remember the historical record concerning other products claimed to be environmentally safe.

@Jeff, sanity checks and safety warnings are good as far as I am concerned.  Wish someone would have sat my mother and I down and talked to us about the dangers of lead poisoning back in the late 70's.  Might have saved me a lot of pain and medical bills.

We've actually had 3 dead PV panels that were fried by lightning and put out about zero watts now.  The dead panels look OK to the naked eye but they must be cooked in some way. This also happened to a friend of ours who was sitting on his porch when it happened. His 6 panels didn't take a direct hit (the lightning either hit the ground and traveled up the grounding wire or was ball lightning in the air nearby) but the end result is the same as ours. We've been off grid for over 40 years and both of these lightning incidents are the first we've encountered in our experience or with many friends that are also off grid. But they can still be recycled into building panels for little sheds, either roof or walls depending on the desired use.

Another PV panel of ours had its glass crack into about 1/2" pieces, but it held together like safety glass. This happened one really cold winter morning after it was about -25F. Apparently the frame and glass contracted at different rates and the frame got too "tight" for the glass, causing it to crack. That same morning a double pane glass window on a solar thermal heater also had the same damage, except that one crumbled into pieces, a big mess to clean up in the snow. We attempted to repair the PV panel with an epoxy coating that is meant to fill in cracks and hold it together, but the panel now puts out about a third of what it should. Sometimes stuff happens despite our best efforts.

Mart Hale wrote:Idea just hit me.......

The new parabolic solar cooker I have uses a reflective tape ........       One could either put the reflective tape on the solar panel and use it in solar cooking or, use it to reflect light on bi-facial panels in the winter time when it is cool.

Or to reflect additional sunlight onto/into cold frames or greenhouses, or onto working solar panels, or into animal areas that get really cold (just be sure they can get away from it if they choose, and make sure your used panel is not at all concave on the reflective tape side.)  Put them behind/above grow lights to reflect as much light as possible back towards the plants.  

Without reflective tape, they could be used to add a layer of insulation at night (however small) or hail protection to existing flat greenhouse or coldframe windows.  Or used to cover house windows in case hail or high wind is expected.   They could be arranged to make temporary brooders or temporary covers for compost bins, probably many other things you would use plywood sheets for on a temporary basis as long as they are intact and you can figure out how to attach them without breaking any seals.

@larisa, depending on the type of solar panel, there might be an inverter underneath it (I am thinking Enphase microinverters). If it is a problem with a microinverter, that is easy enough to swap out. The one with the broken glass, you will want to replace that one - even if it IS currently working, it will let moisture in and the freeze/thaw will bust it up and corrode the internal connections.

following up on the lightning strike, you might want to think of putting in one or more lightning rods around the place.  I do not know enough to make any recommendations, but you should be able to find someone local to you that can spec them, if not put them in as well.

No microinverters on any of our panels. And both of the lightning strikes were on systems that were well grounded. At our house, the lightning hit our neighbor's small wind turbine. It was grounded at all of the guy wire tie downs, with all of them grounded to each other also. But the lightning blew the blade from her wind turbine, went down the ground wires, traveled through the wet soil over to our TV/radio antenna (about 150' away), up that ground wire and fried the inside of the antenna booster (we could see this when we took it down and opened it up). From there it traveled down the coax cable to our house where we had unplugged it from the TV/radio as we always do when there's a storm. When it got to that unplugged cable end, hanging about a foot away from the TV, there was a loud bang/flash as the lightning jumped to the TV. From there it went into the house wiring and took out our Tri-Metric meter, then out to the shed where it took out 2 PV controllers, then out along some of the PV input wires to the furthest distant PV array, about 250' away. The 3 PV panels on that rack were the ones that were toast. The 4th panel on that rack was the one that had the freeze damage a few months earlier and had been removed already. Of course, all of this damage occured at nearly the same moment - flash/bang/ZAPPED!!! The neighbor also had current travel from the wind turbine to her house where it blew an electrical box off the wall. All of these systems were well grounded but when lightning gets into wet soil, all bets are off. Too much excitement for this homesteader! By the way, my husband took apart the TV and found the burned circuit breaker, resoldered it and it still works after many years. All of the other electronics had to be replaced.

Could they be used as the north wall of a green house, as the north wall?
People use black 55 gal drums filled with water to heat green houses in the winter.
That would take up less room. Maybe 2 liter or gallon jugs in front of them to gather the reflective heat?