Below I have added links and comments with regard to various way to self install solar PV panels. This is not an area that I have got involved in and this is largely based on personal contact and web searches.

Solar Panels (PV) are all over the place and used to charge anything from calculators through to houses. When considering solar power, it is very importnat to remember that they don't actaully generate much energy per unit area of solar panel.

Where they are used as a consumer item, the product that they are running is certainly a low user of energy, or rely on long solar exposure for a short period of use.

It is also useful to remember that a solar panel is a collection of micro chips or integrated circuits, these are very small things and though now regarded as cheap, they don't take up much area. A low power solar powered calculator might be cheap enough to throw away (sad), but the solar panel on the calculator is only perhaps 10mm by 30mm and develops milliwatts.

To scale this up to the point we can run a pump or even a house we need to supply Amps rather than milliAmps. So, in scaling up the power needed, it is necessary to significantly increase the area of panel.

DIY Solar PV projects that I would like time to look at.

A solar panel is expensive and extracts maybe 5% of energy that falls on it as sunlight. So why not try to increase the amount of sun that falls on the panel?

I can see two ways of doing this, perhaps with the option of combining them.

Mirrors: A solar panel is usually fixed pointing as south as possible at an angle so that it points as much as possible at the midday sun. Perhaps we can have additional mirrors that reflect the sun towards the panel?

Make the panel follow the sun. Even though my panels are almost at the optimum position for getting the most sunlight, I know that on a sunny day they might miss as much as 1/2 the potential sunlight.

Admittedly mine are too big to move, and they are embedded into the roof, but a with a smaller more system it might be fitted to follow the sun!

On a bright overcast day, I doubt that this would be relevant.

In both cases the finances are simple. Lets say we spend £2,000 on the panels and by spending another £1,000 on 'intelligence' we double their effectiveness, we have saved £1,000! (but that is a very simplistic view)

Relevant Links:

Circuit board for tracker to enable solar panel to follow the sun . This is a really useful concept as by following the sun, the expensive PV panel might double its effectiveness!

Builditsolar: American website looking at DIY solar projects. Very interesting, looks at case studies, the Prius, wind turbines, solar cookers...

Brightlightsolar: This is one of the few places you can purchase solar PV panels and full DIY kits