Tips for Maintaining Your Solar Panels

Maintaining your SunPower solar panels is something that can be done quite easily through routine inspection, cleaning of the panels, and routine maintenance on batteries and wiring. Phosphorus and boron in wiring help with increasing negative and positive conductivity, as all solar cells are made up of two layers to help better facilitate the flow of electricity. Here are some popular ways of maintaining our panels to gain maximum efficiency from them.

Visual Inspection

One of the easiest things to do is just simply to look. If anything is dirty or broken on the solar panels, then you should take further action. What will happen most often is that you’ll have an accumulation of dirt, leaves, bird droppings, or smudges from fingerprints that will affect the productivity of the panels. These can all be cleaned as we’ll explain below, but what you should be cautious of is storm damage.

If you have a powerful enough storm, you could have to deal with the damage from fallen tree branches, or from winds which sometimes loosen the panels from the roof. However, this is incredibly rare, and you shouldn’t have to worry about it too often.

Periodic Cleaning

Cleaning of your panels is recommended but not required. If you do choose to clean them, we recommend cleaning with water pressurized up to 1500 PSI. This will get the dirt off without destroying the panels and affecting their output abilities. When doing so in areas of low total rainfall under 18 in per year, this is especially effective. After you’ve rinsed the panels, it is best for us to lightly soak the panels for 5 minutes then rewet the area before wiping the water off and gently scrubbing with a sponge in a circular motion.

Things to Avoid

Some of the cleaning techniques which are never to be used on solar panels would include never using blades or box openers, which leave horizontal scratches that could impact energy intake. Another cleaning technique to avoid would be using steel wool, scouring powder or scrapers. All of these would greatly affect the level of energy output on the solar panels and would cancel out any standing warranties on the panels.

For all of your solar panel questions, including those relating to installation, power output, and maintenance, don’t hesitate to contact the experts at Energy Concepts!