Silver Falls is 63 homes off Placerville Street with the widest spread of construction dates in Kuna, which means some of the oldest retrofit solar arrays in the city. On an older array the useful question is whether the output loss is dirt or age.
Panels lose a small amount of output every year as a matter of physics, and over a decade or more that adds up to a real reduction that no cleaning recovers. Soiling is a separate, reversible loss sitting on top of that. On an older Silver Falls array the two get conflated, and owners either clean an array whose losses are mostly age, or assume age when a good clean would recover several percent. A clean is the cheap way to find out which, because if output does not recover, the answer is the equipment.
A retrofit array installed a decade ago on an older Kuna home has frequently never been washed, which means a bonded film of canal mineral and dust built up over many summers of baking onto hot glass. That is a substantially different job from maintaining a regularly cleaned array, and the first clean on a long-neglected array usually recovers the most output it ever will. It may not fully clear, because long-term mineral exposure can leave panel glass permanently dulled, and we say so beforehand.
On an array that has been up for ten years or more, the flashings, fasteners and rails have had a decade of thermal cycling, and debris will have accumulated in the gap between panel and roof. While we are there we can tell you what we see, including debris packed under the array that blocks cooling airflow or holds damp against the roof. We do not do electrical or structural work, but reporting what is visible is more useful than saying nothing.
The older Silver Falls streets have grown-in landscaping, so those arrays may also be dealing with tree shading and organic debris including aphid honeydew, which is sticky and builds a composite film. If shading is the real problem, cleaning will not fix it and we will say so. Panels are flooded with pure deionized water, nothing abrasive, no soap. Solar panel cleaning is quoted by array size.
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Both are possible and they get conflated. Panels lose a little output yearly as physics, which no cleaning recovers, while soiling is a separate reversible loss on top. A clean is the cheap way to find out: if output does not recover, the answer is the equipment.
It means a bonded film of canal mineral and dust built up over many summers of baking onto hot glass. The first clean on a long-neglected array recovers the most output it ever will, though it may not fully clear if the glass has been permanently dulled.
We will tell you what is visible, including debris packed in the gap between panel and roof that blocks cooling airflow or holds damp against the roofing. We do not do electrical or structural work, but reporting what we can see is more useful than saying nothing.
On the older streets here with grown-in landscaping, quite possibly. Panels are wired in strings so a shaded panel drags down its neighbours, and cleaning will not fix that. If shading is the cause we will say so rather than selling the wrong service.
By array size, after we look at how it is mounted and accessed. A long-neglected array with a bonded film is more work than a maintained one of the same size, so we assess rather than quoting from panel count alone.
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