Solar Cells +other stuff arrived

Hey, so my solar cells showed up at the end of last week, and the first thing I did was confirm the measurement. Bad news, they are labelled as '3x6 inches', but they aren't. The size is actually 3 and 3/16 by 5 7/8. I actually pre-built the panel to be the correct size, based on an accurate cell size, so needless to say, some re-engineering is taking place. Besides that, everything is going swimmingly; The cells I bought came 'untabbed', meaning no tabbed wire has been attached to them, so I began soldering late on Sunday. After about 5 hours, I'd say I'm half done with the tabbing efforts, and expect to be able to place the cells sometime around the end of the week (after the redesign of the solar panel itself). Also, the cells themselves are super-thin; to give you an idea of how thin, a stack of 40 cells is about 1/2 inch in height. So the math says the cell is each cell is 1/80 of an inch in fractions, or .0125 inches in decimals. Soldering them together is definitely a difficult task, and I'm a little worried that some of them are flawed, as just touching the soldering gun to one caused it to crack from the heat.

I also have been able to mess around with the 'Kill a Watt' power reader ($9.99+shipping and handling on ebay seems to be a typical lower-end price), and came up with some interesting numbers. My laptop takes up about 40 watts of electricity, while the desktop is at around 150 watts. I haven't done the math, but perhaps from an electricity-usage standpoint, laptops could be cheaper than desktops. Some stats from around the house:

Microwave uses 1300 watts
Vacuum uses about 1000-1200, depending on whether the brush is running.
Wife's computer uses about 130 watts.
I can't measure the clothes dryer, as it's a 240 volt appliance, but the heating coil has the number '5400 watts' on the side, which is probably a good clue.

I also took some readings on the various items with standby lights in the house, such as the phone charging stand, the charger for AA and AAA batteries for the kids' various video game controllers. None of the devices with red lights on them took enough power to actually register on my meter, so less than 1 watt. I actually found one that was labelled ( the kids' bathroom led night light), and it said .3 watts. Multiplying that by 24 hours, 30 days, it consumes 216 watts a month. there are around 20 devices with little lights on the front, so assuming they all use this amount, I'm consuming about 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month running standby lights. At 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's roughly 40 cents. So that's good to know, and it puts my mind at ease on what power is being consumed by what objects. It's strange, because when I touch the block of a power supply on these items, it's typically hot to the touch, which makes me think 'huge energy use', but it turns out this is just a perception, not a reality.

At this point, it seems that the most efficient thing to do would be to abandon the solar photovoltaic array, and put up a clothesline in the back yard, so that we could stop running the dryer so much. It costs us 54 cents in electricity every time we run the thing for an hour.


Anyway, the next 3 days will be busy, between karate class, work load, and more karate (I got invited to try out the karate teaching school for a couple of hours on Tuesday, which I'm super-pumped about). I'm hopefully going to finish the pre-soldering after karate on these days, and get the panels mounted on Thursday, or at least that's my hope, so there may not be another post until Friday, as there won't be much to add. Maybe I'll do a 'pictures' post tonight, to show the components.