More and more Australians are tapping into the green, renewable energy harnessed by the sun to power their homes, either completely (off-grid) or to supplement their energy consumption. With rising costs of energy and inflation generally pushing up the cost of living across the board, switching to a free and abundant source of energy just makes sense for a lot of people.Solar panels, specifically modern photovoltaic (PV) systems, have come a long way in the past few decades. No longer are they exorbitantly expensive and inefficient like they used to be; modern solar PV systems are much cheaper and much more efficient thanks to more general adoption of the technology.For most homeowners, the most practical place to put solar panels is right on the roof. This poses some interesting challenges to consider: how can you keep your panels clean and how important is it to clean the panels?
Natural Cleaning and Manual Cleaning
One of the great things about solar panels is that they’re often self-cleaning and don’t require you to mount your roof and scrub them down. Just like your roof tiles, solar panels naturally wick away mild buildups of soil with natural rainfall and the wind, which is “good enough” most of the time.Like with roof tiles, however, some soil just won’t go away and can build up on the panels’ surface, reducing their efficiency and necessitating manual cleaning.
Energy Efficiency of Clean & Dirty Solar Panels
Strictly speaking, clean solar panels – no matter how well-made – never operate at 100% efficiency. Nor does anything else, such as internal combustion engines. With this in mind, we can assume that perfectly clean solar panels operate at “100%” efficiency as a baseline and not as an absolute.In other words, if your solar panels generate 2.4 kWh of energy per day for your home, they should be generating 2.4 kWh (more or less, within reason) when kept clean and under typical conditions.When dirty, however, solar panels lose their ability to transform light into direct current (DC) energy and thus your home no longer generates as much energy as anticipated.How much energy do dirty solar panels generate? It depends on your solar panels, their overall condition, and things such as your roof pitch and daylight hours how much you will generate (even with clean panels).Mildly soiled panels, perhaps with a thin layer of dust from a few dry summer months, might lose around 5%-10% efficiency. Severe neglect and crusted layers of soil, dust, bird droppings, and other debris accumulated over several months might lead to around a 30%-40% loss in energy generation.In brief, neglecting to clean your solar panels can cut into their efficiency by about a third at most. For homes that depend on abundant solar power generation, this could mean having to rely more on grid energy or even having to power off devices to save what precious little energy is being generated due to the dirty solar panels.
How to Clean Your Solar Panels for Peak Generation
Solar panel cleaning is a time-consuming task that can potentially be hazardous since you need to mount your roof safely to scrub away at the surface. The cleaning itself isn’t complex, a mild detergent and a soft-bristled brush or squeegee is all that’s needed to knock away most soil. Given the hassle that solar panel cleaning can be, it’s often best to leave this task to hardworking roofers such as Guardian Roofing.
