Money for nuthin' and solar for free!
In the landscape of emerging technology there will always be Snake oil. I have had several people ask about home made solar panels with that little glint in their eye that suggests they have just dredged up a long lost secret from the darkest seas of the internet. It’s just not enough to tell people, who have invested a lot of time and effort getting excited about a newly discovered concept, that it’s pure bunkum. So I decided to devote a little of my own time to assemble an arsenal of facts about why you can’t just string a bunch of solar cells together, glue them to an old piece of plywood you found in the garage and power your house. As luck would have it some others have done an excellent job dissecting these claims but it wasn’t easy to find them. As you will see if you read further the Snake Oil sales team have done an outstanding job of capturing the search engine results so if you try to find out if their claims are valid you are have to slog through a ton of misinformation.
Peter Parsons on his refreshing “Deceptions” page calls a spade a spade:
“Earth4Energy is a scam. Even the sites earth4energySCAM.com and earth4energySCAM.org promote the product. A Google search turns up 220,000 hits which is most unfortunate because the tidal wave of propaganda totally drowns out legitimate sites and devalues search engine results. There are even ads like “earth for energy sucks” and “don’t buy earth4energy” that lead you to sales sites. If is very difficult to find anything negative because of this clever interference.”
Similarly William White in his opensolar blog pulls no punches when discussing the DIY solar panel scam:
“…this earth4energy scam (aka homemadepowerplant aka homemadeenergy aka DIY Green Energy aka Efficient Planet) runs deep on the Interwebs. Like so many zebra mussels, it appears to have infested the solar web - to the point where it’s virtually impossible to have a solar site with ads that aren’t involved in the scam.
