What You Need To Know About Cleaning Your Solar Panels

Solar panels are an extremely smart green energy investment. To get the most return on your investment and protect it from damage keep your solar panels nice and clean!

When you invest in solar panels to provide green energy to your home, you have made a fantastic investment indeed. With solar energy, you can reduce your electricity, heating and cooling costs for decades to come and do your part to protect the environment. Actually, solar panels can function effectively for as many as three decades if you take good care of them. One of the most important ways you can get the most efficient production from your solar panels is by keeping them clean. Keeping you panels clean can actually double production. Read on to learn how you can get the most energy from your solar panels.

Window Cleaning and Solar Panel Cleaning Have A Lot In Common

Keeping your solar panels clean results in optimum efficiency!

There are a few good ways to clean solar panels. Systems that are set on an angle need less maintenance than those that sit flat because rain will naturally wash some dust and dirt off tilted panels. For this type of setup, just use your garden hose with a spray nozzle to rinse off dust about once a week. This will get a lot of debris off your panels, but you will still have some problem with total dissolved solids from the water.

If you want to give your solar panels a good cleaning, you should follow some standard steps for window cleaning. The photovoltaic cells that make up your solar panel system are protected by big panes of glass that can be cleaned in exactly the same way as glass windows. You know very well that if you just spray your windows with your garden hose, you will end up with streaks and dimness. The same thing will happen with your solar panels. After a while, their energy output will decrease because of the dull film of dissolved solids.

Another problem with solar energy panels is baked on contaminants. Naturally, the sun will harden anything that falls on your panels, such as bird droppings. Even a small obstruction against the rays of the sun can cause your solar energy output to lessen tremendously. This is especially true of panels that lie flat as opposed to those that are tilted.

To tackle problems with both total dissolved solids and baked on contaminants, it is a good idea to use a water fed pole with pure water. It is important that the water be purified because this eliminates total dissolved solids in the water. With a water fed pole system, you can usually stand on the ground and make good contact with all the surfaces on your solar panels to get them nice and clean. Of course, you will need to do this on a fairly regular basis. If you have a flat lying solar panel system, you will need to get on your roof to do your cleaning. If this seems dangerous to you, check with your solar installer or a local window cleaning company to see about having the job done professionally.

There is no doubt that solar panels are an extremely smart green energy investment. Get the most return on your investment and protect it from damage by keeping your solar panels nice and clean. Refer to the information presented here to make the most of your green energy investment.