I often get asked about DIY solar inverters and it seems to be gaining more traction. Personally, I have mixed feelings about it.
Within this realm, there seem to be a few paths you could take;
- Sourcing the inverter, battery, panels, and other components then coupling and/or installing yourself.
- Building any of the individual components from scratch
The problem is that there are a lot of quacks in the industry throughout the value chain, unfortunately, and building from scratch is a whole journey. If you aren’t prepared to lose money, sleep, and perhaps the will to live, this might not be the journey for you.
However, many tinkers and makers seem to enjoy the process of hacking their way through to build something functional. There can be a certain excitement in reading up about the technical details, matching specifications, and being on-call to your inverter to fix the issues that inevitably arise.
That is partially how we felt when we had the bright idea to develop our solar systems in-house.
When we started, a lot of people’s hesitation around solar was around if it would work. They had anecdotal evidence of their neighbour or friend that had invested in solar years ago, and something going wrong. It was a fascinating problem that is rarely seen in other climes. So, we got to work.
We had grand ambitions and were excited to roll our sleeves up and revolutionise solar hardware by tailoring it to our local conditions from our makeshift studio (my living room). We’d consulted dozens of engineers and builders, some with even grander ambitions to build products for export. As an economist with a passion for growing the Naira, I was completely sold!
We quickly got some solid recommendations for fabricators who could build out our dream system and got to prototyping. This is when you need to be as discerning as possible; we have some extremely optimistic salespeople in the market that can promise they can bring you everything, but fail {add humour here}. (behaving like nigerian tailors adding all the spice and jinja)
Our homemade solar journey ended with a handful of somewhat stable locally made products pedalled to our first early believers (to whom we are forever grateful!) and a heapfull of scrap metal. To this day I still have countless, extremely triggering photos on my camera roll of our previous failed products. We quickly cut our losses and found an established manufacturer to get a reliable product out. And that’s the story of how we introduced the best 500w system to West Africa!
Now, all this is not to say others won’t succeed. This was us 5 years ago and nothing would make me happier than to see someone else succeed at this! It is just important to document and share the failure stories for others to learn from and avoid these mistakes.
Have you tried to home-make solar? Share your experience in the comments!
Whilst this didn’t work for us, it provided a great starting point for our current service that helps you sift through the quacks! Uwana Energy has a network of thousands of verified installers, manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, fabricators, financiers, even other enthusiasts that we source from to get all kinds of projects off the ground. Whether you want to make it yourself or connect with an expert in your locality to handle the process for you, we’ve got you covered.