Build your own solar panels

Winter on its way at last, been thinking about how to keep energy use to a minimum.

One idea arises from my recent visit to the Orkneys, and specifically my tour of the home and workshop of the inventor John Vincent; who struck me as being like Caractacus Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (among other projects, he is indeed building a car almost from scratch, though I don't believe he intends it to fly). He said he was more like Stig Of The Dump, the caveman in another children's book who hoarded everything he could find.

If and when global catastrophe kicks in, we will all want to have a John Vincent on our side: he seems undaunted by virtually any practical task, having worked as a car mechanic, fisherman, farmer, builder, plumber, butcher, and in youth development work with troubled children. Oh, and mending clocks.

But I digress.

The thing that really struck me was that Vincent has built a cosy cottage for practically no money at all, using a dilapidated stone outhouse and odd bits of material gathered from skips and elsewhere. This included a vast amount of insulating board, in a variety of sizes, which he puzzled together and joined with expanding foam to create an incredibly cosy home, which he likens to a thermos flask. The heating - up there beyond the northern tip of the Scottish mainland - consists entirely of one electric towel rail element, which heats water running in pipes under the flagstone floor. To remove condensation there's a single-room heat recovery unit (pictured) that he got here. And, er, that's it.

From the outside, the cottage - in traditional stone - looks just like any other. His daughter and her partner and young child have been living there, but now that they're moving out he's looking to do holiday lets.

Vincent tells me he has not yet built himself any photovoltaic panels, to create electricity using sunshine, but if anybody can do it, he can. I lately came across this site which sells instruction in how to make low-budget PV, but since contacting the owner of the site I have had no reply, so don't feel confident about sending off for a kit. I've since found this how-to on the wonderful website Instructables, but it makes the whole thing sound dreadfully hard work.

Does anybody else have any experience with this kind of thing? Are the sites selling instructions as good as they promise? Have you actually built a solar panel - and, if so, does it work?