Depending on your electrical needs, you may want to ask a few friends to come over and help you with this project. First, set up the rails on your roof. Once you have obtained solar panel from either an outside supplier or you built it yourself, your first task should be to set up the rails on your roof. Next, you need to drill holes in your roof and place the mounts followed by the rails that will hold your solar panels. Remember that the panels should be facing the south if you live in the North Hemisphere and they should be in a perfectly straight line (measure with chalk if you need to), keep this in mind when installing homemade solar panels. Also, depending how you installed your rails, you can install the panels in a flat configuration or an angled configuration. The panels need to be consistently connected in either series to allow the current to flow in the correct direction. Finally, you would have to also connect your new set up to a battery. It is best to do this because it would allow you to store up the electricity to use at night or on cloudy days when there is no sun out.