3rd Place for Home Made Energy
Ranking score:	#3		Highly Recommended Product
Price:	$47.00		Regular price $197
100% Guarantee:	YES / NO		60 days – “$100 payback” Guarantee.
Pdf Manuals:	YES / NO
Video tutorials:	YES / NO		QuickTime and Flash formats.
Membership TV:	YES /NO
Solar info:	YES / NO
Wind info:	YES / NO
Bio Fuel info:	YES /NO		Doesn’t venture away from the main topic.
Other stuff:	YES / NO		15 New High quality ‘layman’s terms’ videos.
Overall ‘Star Rating’
Our Review Criteria:			Our Quick Guide.
How green is Green?				4½ / 5
How easy is it to build?				4½ / 5
How high is the quality of instructions?				5 / 5
How much will it cost me to build?				4½ / 5
How available are the parts I will need?				4½ / 5
How long will it take me to make?				4½ / 5
Does the product all hang together as whole?				4½ / 5
Total Score:				32 / 35

How Green?
This set of guides from Home Made Energy have recently been upgraded which helps to shoot them up the ranking in my estimation. With ability and promise of solar panels for less than $120 each and you can get wind turbine guides to match – that says to me that Home Made Energy 100% green to my way of thinking.

How Easy?
With the construction of the Home Made Energy components broken down into 5 distinct steps – all described within the new 15 part video series, this sucker is easy to make, even for the complete DIY novice. Watch every move of the electrician building a real ‘live’ solar panel using the Home Made Energy guide - it doesn’t get any more better than that.

How High?
The quality of the Home Made Energy blueprints and the instruction are high, with very little left to your imagination, with video supplying the detail. You know what they say – “The camera never lies”. Video is most people’s best friend, as the majority of the population will be classified as ‘Visual Learners’ and the Home Made Energy guides cater for the majority.

How Much?
This one is clearly started as far as the solar panels are concerned – Build a high quality panel for under $150 or you can claim ALL of your money back and still claim a $100 “better than risk free” straight from Home Made Energy. Well you can’t say fairer than that. The ‘build a Wind Turbine for under $200’ guide is being offered completely FREE with the Solar Panel guide as a bonus. You can safely build both Solar Panels and Wind Turbine for far less than buying retail cost panels.

How Available?
Let’s talk solar panels first – the solar cells are the main components of any solar panel and these are very easy to find – just Google “Solar Cells” or check out eBay. My advice though, is tread carefully,  pay a little more and you can get the higher output 6” x 6” solar cells or go for top end mono-crystalline cells and get the highest output per panel. The cost is a little more, but you get what you pay for right? Find cells locally to save on shipping costs and keep the cost of your Home Made Energy project down too.

Now let’s now talk wind turbines – the one thing you have to hunt around for the best deal on, is the electric motor. They are the least straightforward component to find and they are generally the most expensive part of any DIY wind turbine project and the Home Made Energy turbine is no different.

How Long?
The Home Made Energy solar panel will take you under 3 hours if you have studied the guide and videos, collected all of your component parts and arranged all of your tools. It makes sense to choose a suitable inside work area, so if you strike a problem while constructing a Home Made Energy unit, you can just drop what you are doing and go back another day. It’s re-assuring that a solar panel can be built and mounted over a week-end.

Does it all hang together?
The guys at Home Made Energy have raised their game with the new revision of this popular DIY guide by adding video training to the already clear written manual. By virtue of watching someone ‘over the shoulder’ as they make a solar panel for real makes this a very good buy. I had no problem following the guide or the videos.

Are Home Made Energy Moving up the Rankings?

Home Made Energy have jumped up the rankings, closing in on the leaders in the field. I always rate customer service highly with any product I buy and to be fair it’s the area where most companies fail miserably. But not Home Made Energy though. They are generally easy to contact support using email. A big plus is the re-assurance that the guides and the panel built in the video series are being built by a trained electrical expert. The results produced by Home Made Energy are excellent.

Home Made Energy have run a close race.

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