Solar panel cleaning

Rain does a fair job on light dust. What it does not shift is the dirt that costs you output: baked-on bird droppings, moss and lichen on the panel edges in damp shaded spots, spring pollen films, and harvest dust on farms. A panel’s cells are wired in series, so a soiled patch pulls down the section of the panel it sits on. Bypass diodes limit that to part of one module, but on a string inverter the effect still shows up across the array, so you lose more output than the amount of dirt would suggest.

A standard suburban roof often only needs attention every year or two. Farms, coastal properties, houses under trees and roofs with bird activity need it more often. The better guide is your monitoring data rather than the calendar: if output has slipped against the same months last year and the weather has not, soiling is the usual suspect. If your panels are visibly clean and producing on benchmark, we will tell you to keep your money.

Please don’t. Pressure washers force water past the edge seals and can crack the glass. It is the most common way owners damage their own panels. Abrasive brushes take the anti-reflective coating off, and it does not grow back. Bleach and strong detergents degrade the seals and can void the panel warranty. We use deionised water and soft-bristle brushes. If you have safe ground-level access, plain water and a soft brush is fine and we will happily tell you how. Anything at height should be left to people equipped for it.

We install glass-glass panels, with glass on both faces rather than a plastic backsheet, and they carry a 30-year performance warranty. A performance warranty and a product warranty are two different things: the performance warranty covers the output over time, and the product warranty covers the panel itself. Your quote names both terms for the exact panel we are fitting. The inverters and batteries we fit are warranted for 10 years or more, and you should still expect an inverter to need replacement at least once over the life of the system.

Very little, but not none. Irish conditions bring moss, lichen, salt and agricultural dust, and soiling reduces output gradually enough that owners often do not notice. Periodic inspection, cleaning where needed, and monitoring that catches faults early will keep an array performing across its full life.

Usually yes, though it depends on your existing inverter and consumer unit. Some systems accept a battery directly, others need an additional AC-coupled unit. We can assess a system we did not install and tell you what is possible before you commit to anything.

The software does the part nobody keeps up by hand: weather-adjusted yield models, string comparison, fault-code history and degradation trends, run every week across every system we watch. The judgement about what to do with a flag stays with our engineers. So when a visit is needed, it’s a targeted one: the analysis says which string or which component to look at, rather than sending someone up for a general look.

Export payments come from your electricity supplier under the Clean Export Guarantee, not from the government. When we commission your system we notify ESB Networks (the NC6 or NC7 form), which is what registers you as a microgenerator; your supplier then applies its export rate to your account. With a smart meter your actual export is measured; rates vary by supplier, so it is worth comparing. The first €400 a year of export income is tax-free until the end of 2028. Budget 2027 announced an increase to €600 a year, which takes effect once it is legislated.