Solar panels vs. Peltier tiles.?

Solar Tiles Vs Solar Panels

Not a stupid question. But the information you're looking for is available online, so you could have found this out with a little research.

Peltier devices - or strictly speaking in this case, Seebeck devices - tap into heat flow to convert some of the energy potential directly to electricity. While that has lots of applications in certain circumstances, the efficiency is crap.

Seriously. Crap. People say solar is worthless because it's only 20% efficient (just the panel, if you can crack into 20% including the cabling and power handling hardware, the world will beat a path to your door), but that's two to four times as efficient as a Seebeck device.

What a Seebeck really could do, however, would be to make it possible to stack systems. Imagine:

Solar panel on top, absorbing light and converting as much as 20% of that into electricity.

Heat sink panels line the back of the solar panels. Solar panels don't like getting too hot, so cooling them off would be good.

Seebeck devices absorb the heat from the solar heat sinks. Pick up another few percentage points.

Heat sinks again, this time with water channels.

Water channels lead to hot water tanks for domestic hot water, or at least tempered water supply. Tempered water is water that has been partially heated prior to going through the actual water heater. This takes an ENORMOUS load off the water heating system and can raise a modest water heating system's capacity to within reach of otherwise unattainable high demand loads. Solar water heating is the biggest return on investment of any solar project. It pays itself off in, at most, just a couple of years. Solar electric usually pays off in under a decade, and is reliable for at least 20 years (inverters, maybe not).

The catch here is that the Seebeck system is optional. You could line the backs of the solar panels with heat exchangers for water heating and get your water somewhat hotter, without the added expense and wiring of the thermoelectric system. The addition of the Seebeck system would represent a marginal increase in energy output, a significant addition to the expense, and an added layer of complexity. Frankly, it isn't worth the trouble. It's only good if nothing else could really fit the bill. For the cost required, it would be a much smarter investment - and represent a much larger increase of system capacity - to skip the Seebeck and invest that money in more photovoltaic panels.

Build Home Solar Power - http://solarpower.siopu.com/?WAl

per joule of energy exposure, no. peltiers are very innefficient, but theoretically it could work.depending on the setup, given high energy efficiency is very hard to obtain.