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  • Solar panel maintenance

    Can anyone tell me what regular maintenance do solar panels requires?


  • #2
    A good rainstorm every 3 or 4 months to rinse the dust off.
    If you have to provide the rain, do it in the morning before the panels get hot . Cold water and hot glass (even tempered glass) is not worth the risk of breaking a panel.
    Powerfab top of pole PV mount (2) | Listeroid 6/1 w/st5 gen head | XW6048 inverter/chgr | Iota 48V/15A charger | Morningstar 60A MPPT | 48V, 800A NiFe Battery (in series)| 15, Evergreen 205w "12V" PV array on pole | Midnight ePanel | Grundfos 10 SO5-9 with 3 wire Franklin Electric motor (1/2hp 240V 1ph ) on a timer for 3 hr noontime run - Runs off PV ||
    || Midnight Classic 200 | 10, Evergreen 200w in a 160VOC array ||
    || VEC1093 12V Charger | Maha C401 aa/aaa Charger | SureSine | Sunsaver MPPT 15A

    solar: http://tinyurl.com/LMR-Solar
    gen: http://tinyurl.com/LMR-Lister

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    • #3
      Originally posted by Mike90250 View Post
      A good rainstorm every 3 or 4 months to rinse the dust off.
      If you have to provide the rain, do it in the morning before the panels get hot . Cold water and hot glass (even tempered glass) is not worth the risk of breaking a panel.
      +1. The performance of my array seems to decrease, very roughly ~ 1%/week due to fouling, but every situation is different with some locations cleaner/dirtier than others, even in the same neighborhood, at least from my cursory observation and cooperative neighbors.

      A decent rain seems to restore ~ 2/3 - 3/4 of the performance loss from fouling. If it doesn't rain, I hose my array ~ every 4 weeks or so at the rate of ~ 2-3 gal./panel w/H2O from a hose. Always in the early morning after sunup.

      FWIW, My H2O is pretty hard, but I can detect no performance improvement by removing the water spots after rinsing.

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      • #4
        Thanks guys for your replies...

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        • #5
          no maintenance required
          BSEE, R11, NABCEP, Chevy BoltEV, >3000kW installed

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          • #6
            Originally posted by Isoul90 View Post
            Thanks guys for your replies...
            For any thing you may have found in my mental spoor, you're welcome.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by solarix View Post
              no maintenance required
              My panels have been up for over 5 years and I have never touched them except to remove snow. Tilt is 32* and regular rain showers here in Indiana pretty much keep them clean.

              But on close inspection I did notice ~1/4 inch mud dam at the bottom of each panel where the glass meets the frame. I don't think it affects the performance much but I plan to remove it some warm day this spring.

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              • #8
                We have several solar powered radio sites, some having over a hundred panels, and the topic of preventive maintenance has never even come up. We have them all over California, in the desert, mountains, on the coast. We don't do anything and never have a problem.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by Isoul90 View Post
                  Can anyone tell me what regular maintenance do solar panels requires?
                  With the daily heating and cooling cycles at considerable power, some electrical connections might work loose.
                  I am into checking for any warm wiring CONNECTORS or JOINTS near the end of a sunny day, a couple times
                  a year. Some I make SURE are tight after dark.

                  With multiple strings, check that the currents match under strong sun, with a clamp on ammeter. If
                  anything is off, I insert voltage taps in the middle of a string and look for balance on each side, or a
                  lack of it. Bruce Roe

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                  • #10
                    Our town dump (excuse, me transfer station) just put online 3,000 panels on the abandoned landfill. A good use for this unusable land. I'd be interested in how they deal with this problem. Less than a hundred yards away they have a massive yard waste recycling center. With this matter ground up onsite, they make topsoil. There is a constant stream of cars and trucks all day hauling in sand. This is a big operation and it gets really dusty

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                    • #11
                      A couple of anecdotal reference points:

                      The folks at the Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley have had a 1 MW array operational since 2008. I try to check in on them 1X/yr. in the summer. They've replaced one of 4 drives for the array single axis tracking and a few panels that got wacked by maint. golf carts. The array gets washed every other year, but it's only for the sake of the guano. They were claiming no measureable performance decrease due to dust/dirt, but their ideas of how to measure performance changes are a bit sub par IMO. Anyway, of the 5740 or so panels, 2 or 3 failed shortly after startup and that's about it. The inverters seem to be working just fine.

                      There is a 1.3 MW array about 1+ miles or so within clear and unobstructed line of sight from my house. Since 2008 construction, I have seen no activity of any sort at that sight, not even cleaning. The array is a 1 axis tracker and that seems to be working nominally, making me believe it's doing something.

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