Here you can find Solar Panels and technological accessories related to Solar Energy: Click Here If you want to learn about Solar...
Here you can find Solar Panels and technological accessories related to Solar Energy: Click Here
If you want to learn about Solar Panels, to advise you before buying or to build your own Solar Panel: Click Here
solar panel cleaners are charging people hundreds of dollars to clean their panels and a lot of them claim you will see an instant 20 to 25% increase in power output which would be awesome if it's true it's certainly a claim worth testing so I set up three dirty solar panels and I'm tracking their power output in real time I'm going to clean them we'll see how much more power they output and we'll find out if solar panel cleaning is actually worth your money this first solar panel is the least dirty of the three it had just just a thin layer of dirt and Grime on it before cleaning it was outputting 84 watts and these are all 100 watt solar panels that I'm using after cleaning and after I got my shadow out of the way it started outputting 86 Watts so not a big increase for this first one there's the before and after so it is noticeably cleaner but cleaning it only led to a 2 and 1/2% increase but we'll talk about all the numbers at the end and like I said this first one was the least dirty so I moved on to the second panel which as you can see was much much dirtier before cleaning it was outputting 83 watts and I did something I'll mention it now a little unique to clean these panels I used water that was the same temperature as the panel for a couple reasons number one so the panels don't fracture which can happen if you put cold water on hot glass number two I'm trying to control for temperature since a colder solar panel outputs more power after cleaning the second panel started outputting 92 Watts for an increase of 9 Watts decent but not yet at the 20 to 25% increase and the differences between the before and after are Stark maybe we'll see a bigger increase with this last panel which is the dirtiest of the three I sprinkled flour all over it to mimic pollen and I even splattered some white stuff on it to mimic bird droppings this thing was dirty and it was outputting 82 Watts before cleaning so I don't know how this happened but solar panel cleaning seems to be the internet's favorite new side hustle I see so many videos about it I'm all for people trying to start something of their own and I love that this particular side hustle is related to renewable energy that's awesome so no shade on anyone who's out there making money cleaning solar panels I'm just doing this test so homeowners can have a better idea if solar panel cleanings are worth their money the difference is once again very noticeable in the before and after and after cleaning this panel is outputting 93 to 94 Watts so here was the power output of all the panels before cleaning and then here's the power output after cleaning and yes for these final readings I did confirm that the panels were at the same temperature as when they started the first solar panel went from around 84 watts to 86 Watts which was a 2.4% increase the second panel went from 83 to 92 Watts which was a 10.8% increase and the last panel went from 82 to 93 Watts or a 13.4% increase the average increase was 7.3 Watts roughly 88.9% one of my main takeaways is that a 20% increase in output from a cleaning would be very unlikely I'm sure it happens but I wouldn't bet on it happening to you because we saw how dirty a panel had to be for a clean to increase its power output by 133% so is it worth it to get your solar panels cleaned based on the numbers we saw from this test you might think okay a 10% increase a 133% increase that's pretty good but obviously that's a temporary increase it'll immediately start getting dirty again one way to look at it is how much power am I losing because my panels are dirty and there is some research on this the average soiling loss I see is around 4 to 7% uh though it ranges quite a bit based on location so if your solar system is already saving you let's say $2,000 per year and you're losing 7% from soiling then if your panels work perfect perfectly clean all year round you'd be saving an extra $150 per year which is pretty good but your panels will immediately start getting dirty again after the cleaning so your savings will actually be less than that how much less it's hard to say I found this map which I find really interesting it shows the average annual soiling losses from 2006 to 2020 so quite a few years of data the image quality is pretty bad I'm sorry about that so it might be hard to see uh these numbers on the bottom but essentially for most of the US you're seeing an average of like 0 to 0.15% soiling loss per year so essentially zero but there is much higher soiling loss in this area which includes California Arizona Nevada in those States the soiling losses look to get up to like the 1.5% to 9% range so much much higher I mean the really high soiling losses don't even happen in the US they occur in the Sahara the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East East and I know I have some viewers in India and Australia and as you can see large parts of those countries also have higher rates of soiling losses so for most people in the US which is where most of my viewers are looking at all these numbers I don't think it's worth it to pay for a solar panel cleaning in most cases for a few reasons number one a cleaning is probably not going to increase production by that much again we saw how dirting those panels had to be to increase output by 13.4% number two the Sol panels will immediately start getting dirty again so any increase will be temporary and three given how much cleaners are charging I saw a lot of people saying they were getting quotes in the $200 to $400 range it will take you a long time to make your money back one of the main scenarios where it might be worth it to get your panels cleaned is if you live in an area with high soiling losses and high energy prices so in the US in particular looking at Energy prices it looks like Southern California is the main area area where it might make sense in Southern California it looks like there's High soiling losses electricity is really pricey so it might be worth it to get your panels cleaned every so often but how often that's really tough to say based on the numbers we're seeing maybe once every couple years a common question is can I just do it myself yes of course you can and there are a lot of videos on YouTube of how to do it safely there are a couple ways you'd want to do it differently than how I did in particular it's good practice to disconnect your solar panels before cleaning them I left mine connected in the name of science you could also just wake up early one day before your panels get too hot and spray them with a hose which you might need to do occasionally if something like pollen season causes a large drop in output and I'm curious if you've ever gotten your solar panels cleaned was it worth it to you you know how much did it cost how much of a increase in production did you see do you do it regularly and if so how often every year every 6 months every other year let me know in the comments but whether you decide to get your solar panels cleaned or not or do it yourself hope this has saved you some money that's it for this video and I'll see you in the next one ...
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