Arroyo Vista sits between Black Cat and Ten Mile on the boundary with working farmland, and panels here collect coarse agricultural soil rather than the fine urban dust a panel in a city gets. Coarse soil is the worst thing to have on a solar panel, for a reason that has nothing to do with how it looks.
Solar panel glass carries an anti-reflective coating, and that coating is the whole reason the panel converts as much light as it does. Coarse field soil sitting on it blocks light, which costs output directly, and any attempt to dry-wipe or brush it off drags sand-sized particles across that coating. Scratching the anti-reflective layer costs you more output permanently than the dirt was costing you temporarily, which is why the single most damaging thing a homeowner can do to a panel is clean it the way they would clean a window.
We flood panels with pure deionized water rather than scrubbing them. Deionized water has had its dissolved solids stripped out, so it lifts and carries soil away and then dries without leaving any mineral behind, which matters enormously on a panel: a spotted panel is a shaded panel. Nothing abrasive touches the glass, and no soap is used, because soap residue on a panel attracts the next round of dust faster than clean glass would.
Every lot in Arroyo Vista runs on untreated Boise-Kuna Irrigation District canal water, and where sprinkler overspray reaches a panel, particularly a low-slope roof array or anything within throw distance, the mineral dries onto glass that is sitting in full sun at elevated temperature. That bakes it on far harder than the same deposit would set on a window. Panels are also the one surface where you cannot see the problem from the ground, so it usually shows up as an unexplained drop in production instead.
Solar panel cleaning is quoted by array size, because a ten-panel array and a thirty-panel array are genuinely different jobs. The honest way to decide whether you need it is your own production data: if your monitoring shows output tracking below the same month last year with no equipment fault, soiling is the most likely explanation, and in a field-adjacent subdivision like this it is usually the explanation. We would rather you checked that than took our word for it.
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Please do not. Coarse field soil is sand-sized, and dragging it across the anti-reflective coating on panel glass scratches that coating permanently, which costs more output than the dirt was costing temporarily. Panels get flooded with water, never dry-wiped or brushed.
Because deionized water has no dissolved solids, so it lifts soil away and dries leaving nothing behind, and on a panel a mineral spot is a shaded spot. Soap leaves a residue that attracts the next round of dust faster than clean glass would.
Your own monitoring data. If output is tracking below the same month last year with no equipment fault, soiling is the most likely cause, and in a field-adjacent subdivision it usually is. We would rather you checked that than took our word for it.
It leaves mineral that bakes on hard. Untreated canal water landing on glass sitting in full sun at elevated temperature sets far more firmly than the same deposit on a window, and a spotted panel is a shaded panel. Low-slope roof arrays within sprinkler throw are the usual victims.
By array size, because a ten-panel and a thirty-panel array are genuinely different jobs. We look at the array, the access and how it is mounted before quoting rather than applying a per-panel figure that would be wrong for most installations.
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