Solar Panel cleaning kit for DIY

[mnhim001]

I would like to clean my own solar panels. Can someone recommend some equipment that I can put together? Every kit that I've found is for commercial use and I don't plan to start up a solar cleaning business.

I am looking at a Equipmaxx water fed pole, but my main concern is having either a DI filter or a softener or both?

I've also read about washing the panels during a specific time of day. If I put the faucet tap water onto a hot solar panel, the panel would crack?

Any insight to this would be truly appreciated. Thanks in advanced.

[solar pete]

Hi mnhim001,

Best to clean them early morning, first light, before they get hot, be carful don't get water on any cables or junction boxes or Dc isolators etc., don't use soaps or chemicals, just water and towel or soft brush will do don't scrub them hard you are only looking to remove dust or any bird turds really, hope that helps, cheers

[J.P.M.]

Like Pete writes, do any cleaning early in the A.M. before the sun gets your array too hot and the thermal shock of cold(er) water causes problems in addition to glazing breakage.
Also, and always - safety first - keep water away from electricity cables and devices.

Practical stuff:
- Use tap water, even if the water is hard. People think the hard water spots they see decrease performance over D.I. or distilled H2O use. I couldn't measure a difference in performance one over the other (tap water or treated). I do think my methods were/are pretty involved and rather technical and the results seem to show reasonable agreement with what's in the published literature. Also, and technically, the stuff that causes hard water spots is quite (but not totally) transparent to the light frequencies most useful to PV.
- I hose my array ~ 1X/month when it doesn't rain (I commonly see little to no rain for about 6+ months of the year) with tap water only, no soap.
I hose at the rate of about 3 or so l/panel and let it drip dry. Again, the left over spots don't seem to affect performance over using D.I. or distilled water in any way I've been able to measure. One conclusion I've reached from all this fun I've had is that the human eye is a poor judge of PV glazing's transparency to short wave solar irradiance.
- Your fouling rate will vary from others' - even that of your neighbors.
I probably have an average fouling rate for my area (semi-rural, SO.CA).
Without rain or cleaning, my array fouls at a rate such that the performance decreases at a rate of about 1% per week, making my average fouling penalty something like 2% or so with the 1 X/month hosing.
- About 1X/year I get the long 4m pole with a soft cloth (not a plug but Unger seems to have the best brush/pole system for my money and purpose) and use that with tap water and some mild dish soap (also not a plug but I use Dawn). I don't bother with the squeegee as I couldn't measure a difference in performance with/without it.
Such 1x/yr. soap/water/brush/cleanings will restore just about all the performance left in my array.
I also use soap and the brush on any big owl skrocks that show up in between hosings.
- The tap water only hosing will restore about 2/3 to 3/4 of the performance lost to fouling and the fouling penalty rate continues at ~ 1% of clean performance deterioration per week.
- As I wrote, fouling rates vary, but in my neighborhood, if arrays are not cleaned, the array fouling penalty, without rain or cleaning, seems to become asymptotic at very roughly somewhere between 10 at 15 % of clean and new performance. Observationally and from a practical/common sense standpoint, this seems to make sense to me as most skylites aren't visually blocked by dirt/schmutz at a rate of 50%/year in areas that get little rain.
So, if you don't clean your array at all (and few folks do) adding 15 % to system/array size can often be one way to account for array fouling, but at a penalty in cost effectiveness.

Finally, commercial cleaning of arrays is a complete, f-bombing rip-off.
The financial gain from cleaning is small and nowhere near the cost of the cleaning.
And anyway, the array continues to foul at a rather steady rate so that after 10-15 dry weeks, the array is as dirty as it's likely to get.

Take what you want of the above. Scrap the rest.