I’ve been using a budget 6V solar panel to power my mailbox notifier. It’s one of those polycrystalline epoxy resin panels you’d usually find in bargain-bin solar lights. I should’ve known better, these things are just not up to withstanding the hot Aussie sun. After just a year’s use, the panel turned milky with a mysterious white residue. I thought I’d snapped a ‘before’ photo for posterity, but alas, I didn’t.
Headlight protection vinyl
Last year, I bought some car headlight vinyl protector film off eBay. Our headlights had suffered a similar fate to the solar panel—cloudy and sad-looking. The film, sticky on one side and protected by layers you peel off, gets stretched over the headlights and heated to form a smooth protective cover. Here’s the video I watched:
While it worked, applying the film was trickier than I’d anticipated. Pro tip: the film has a protective layer on each side, which, if you don’t remove, results in a lot of confusion and wasted time. Still, the headlights have stayed clear for a year, so I’d call it a win.
Attacking the panel
I sanded the solar panel with 800, then 1200 and finally 2000 grit sandpaper, giving it a smooth finish before applying the film. Thanks to the panels small size and flat surface, the process was surprisingly straightforward. The Aussie summer sun did all the heating for me, making it even easier to apply. So far, it’s looking promising.
This is after rejuvenating it and applying the film. It almost looks like new, although one of the cells may have a hair crack from distorting in the heat.
The Lithium-ion battery is charging as expected. It probably isn’t worth buying this film just to rejuvenate a small panel, but I thought I would do it as an experiment. I’ll report back later in the year with the results.
Update 3 November 2025
It’s been almost 11 months since I added the film to the solar panel. Up until the last couple of weeks the film was still looking clear and smooth. Today I noticed that the film is now starting to flake off along a couple of lines. I tried to peel the remaining film off, but it had become very brittle. It wasn’t possible to simply peel it off.
While it worked well for a while, I’m calling this a fail. It would be much better to spend a bit more and buy a quality panel to stat with.
Banner image
The banner image is from my ongoing experimenting with the built-in AI image creation tool in WordPress. This image was created from the prompt “Generate an image of a man sanding a very small solar panel. Make it in the style of a drawing from a 1970’s book for boys.”
I tried creating over 50 images before settling on this one, and it doesn’t display the type of panel I am writing about. A couple of interesting things I found. All the men in the images that had a visible face had some sort of facial hair, even when I did not include “Make it in the style of a drawing from a 1970’s book for boys.”
The AI had trouble with a small solar panel, and most images had large solar panels. I tried to generate with one on a mailbox, but in most images the man was sanding the front of the mailbox and not the panel, even when I clearly included “sanding the solar panel”.
It’s been interesting trying AI image generation, but I think I have a long way to go with refining the prompts, and there is probably a limit with the AI I am using that prevents creation of some images.
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