Solar Lab Technician

The sun’s rays can do more than give people snazzy tans. Solar panels can transform sunlight and put it to work running electrical equipment, heating water, and lighting up a darkened pathway. Solar Lab Technicians spend the day building and testing this solar equipment.

Working under the direction of an Engineer or Product Manager, you — the Solar Lab Technician — given a set of drawings detailing the size of the solar panel you should build, and how much power it should produce. You then build a prototype of that panel, and test it over and over to make sure it can meet the requirements laid out in the drawings. You may also write reports that explain how your product should be installed and configured so people in the field know how to get the same results you got in your laboratory.

When that product moves into large-scale production, you may walk the production floor and pull completed items off the line for testing. Along the way, you provide advice on how production methods can be tweaked for efficiency.

As a Solar Lab Technician, you may also be given old products containing solar elements, and asked to make them more efficient or more powerful. You take these products apart, looking for components that can be replaced. You also examine the computer systems that run them to make sure those systems are running efficiently.

To find hidden problems (and solutions to those problems), you run many computer simulations. When you track down a solution, you sip your coffee with a satisfied smile, and set to work fixing the problem and writing up your solution in a report.