Bought solar cells... can't get them to work!
 

I recently purchased a 100- pack of 3x6 inch 1.8w solar cells on Ebay.
link to the same item on Ebay
I got them in good shape through the mail(they are fragile - one of my students already broke one!) and today tried checking one for output. My DMM won't read any voltage or current output. I double checked connections and tried another DMM; same thing. Is there something I'm missing?
I emailed the seller and he hasn't replied yet. I'll post his response in this thread when he does.
Matt

Duuu-uuude....you're tempting me to buy those.

Keep us posted and let us know how it works out. Oh...and how badly beaten was that student after he broke the cell? :D

lol, only lightly scolded - $2.50 is a small price to pay to teach the rest of his project group how fragile they are.
Luckily he broke the first one he touched; this way they will be veeery careful with the others.

AHHHH! the front side of the cell is connected to the two tabs. The back side is all conductive. To put the cells in series, lay the next cell on top of the previous cell's tabs.
Cells work fine; in my living room, lit with CFLs, the cell is putting out about 0.15V.

Yes, the electrons flow from one side to the other, it's how they have always worked, it makes me wonder why students would have these in their hands if they didn't know what was going on.

They/we knew how they worked, but the two leads coming out of the cell was the killer... plus, the back side doesn't look as conductive as it is.
One tab / lead on the front wouldn't have played as well into misleading.

The kids finally came in outside of school to put the cells together - they put 26 in series for a target output of 13V. They read almost 14V when they took them outside midday today, at almost 4A, so they're as good or better than advertised. These even had about 5% of each cell overlap due to size constraints of their design, so they're good cells.
They were easy to solder using the tabs and the solder points on the backs.