I have never seen ventilation on a solar panel setup.
Maybe with it, it would last longer.

Jesus

Hi Guruji,

Most store bought panels are vacuum sealed between tempered glass.

If your making your own panels then it's a different story, you want to minimize moisture in between your panels and glass as much as possible. Moisture causes all kinds of problems, shorts, algae, dry rot, fogged glass, corrosion, weakening glue, etc... If your worried about it you could run a small computer fan off a smaller external panel to create ventilation through your larger one, this would also help in cooling the panels.

@Cherryman,

I would suggest cooling it wit waterpanels at the back, that way you harness also heat!

Actually that sounds like a pretty good idea, if you cycle the hot water away with a solar powered pump to a hot water storage tank.

Sadly, the combination of two green technologies
that have been available seperately for quite a while,
have failed to appear together in unison as a team.

On the one hand there are solar panels,
on the other solar heat harvesting panels.



I've been waiting for someone's noodle
to realize they've always belonged together...



Take a standard sheet-by-the-roll of
over the counter copper roof flashing.

The thickest you can find.

Unroll and cut into appropriate rectangular sizes
that would be a little larger than the matrix of
solar cells your planning on implementing.

Now take soft small scale soft copper tubing,
1/4" seems about right for a high flow rate.

Place the copper sheet on a piece of plywood
and using a tubing bender for tight bends
begin to tightly cover the sheet with rows.

Due to the limit on the bend radius of tubing,
some creative interlocking patterns will be needed.

Once a maximum (Reasonable) pattern has been formed,
get out your hand torch and solder it to the sheet.

Flip the sheet and bend the edges up to form a tray,
and solder the corners to make is leak-tight.

Mixed some two-part potting product
that comes by the gallon inexpensively,
and pour it into the tray

Take your pre-formed rows of solar cells
and lay them in one at a time,
working out the bubbles.

When it hardens, connect the rows together,
and pot the upper and lower connections too.

With the potting product in full contact
with the backs of all the solar cell rows,
condensation is prevented from occuring.

Also, the same potting product will conduct
quite a lot of the heat to the copper backing,
were the tubing can carry it away for use.

The dark color of todays cells assures a lot of heat,
so even though the potting product may not be
the most efficient heat transfer compound to use,
it will still do a considerably better job for us than
using absolutely nothing like we are currently doing.

Create an edge box frame and put on a clear front,
lower the the panel in solar cell's facing down,
and fill the back couple of inches with some
stir-and-pour expanding foam insulation.

Get or borrow a vacuum pump for the front,
and wait a week for all products to fully cure.


There are many things above
that can be picked on for sure,
I don't care at this point frankly,
I'm getting sick of the negative minds here.

I'm tossing a concept out there
in simple layman's terms for ease

I chose to write it in simple terms
to keep the length down a lot.

Run with it...

If you sealed the heatsink tops
and flowed water through them
you'd have something there.

That would maintain the thermal differential
required for that application to perform well.

The cost-verses-recovery ratio sucks,
but peltiers can't stay costly forever.



Then again, the manufacturers of peltiers
could just add the darned P/N stack
on the back of PV's in the first place...

That would yield BOTH photvoltiac and peltier
recovery of the suns provided available energy.

We would only need to employ
fluid (Heat) sinking to the back
to maintain the thermal differential
that harvests both heated water
and two forms of electrical potential.



I've been asking peltier manufacturers
here and overseas to make tubular ones
for years now, they don't see the need.

The inner and outer tubes would be
both the conductors and the thermal surfaces.

Some are entertaining the idea somewhat.

Mount them in a third tube to provide
the second sealed outer passageway
and your in business.

Basically and it is just an intercooler
with a P/N junction medium.

Sure would be great for GEET/Exhaust work, etc.

Then again, if you've ever used a clamp-style
ammeter on a geet, there is truely awsome
and extremely high gauss values available
to be harvested already around the reactor...