Thunder Rock sits west of Ten Mile toward Black Cat with compact Lennar plans on 0.12 to 0.13 acre lots. When a sprinkler head is a few feet from the house, a single-story roof array is well within its reach, and that is the dominant problem for solar here.
On most houses a roof array is safely above the sprinklers. On a compact single-story Thunder Rock plan with heads a few feet from the wall throwing high for new landscaping, overspray genuinely reaches the panels. That water is untreated Boise-Kuna canal water carrying suspended silt and dissolved mineral, and it dries onto glass that is sitting in full sun at elevated temperature, which bakes the deposit on considerably harder than it would set on a window.
It is worth being clear about why this costs money rather than just looking untidy. Every opaque or translucent mineral spot on a panel shades the cell beneath it, and shading is what solar panels are least tolerant of, because panels in a string interact. A stippled pattern of hard water spots across an array is a distributed shading problem, and it reduces production in a way that scales with how much of the surface is covered.
If a head is throwing onto your array, the mineral comes straight back within weeks of any cleaning. We identify the offending head and tell you which one it is at no charge while we are on site, because a five-minute adjustment is worth more to you than a recurring panel clean. Saying so costs us repeat work, which is the point: on a compact single-story with a low array, this is very often the whole answer.
Panels are flooded with pure deionized water, which has no dissolved solids and so lifts soiling and dries without leaving anything behind. Nothing abrasive touches the anti-reflective coating, because scratching it costs output permanently. No soap is used either. Solar panel cleaning is quoted by array size, and on the modest arrays typical of these compact plans the number is correspondingly modest.
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On a compact single-story with heads a few feet from the wall throwing high for new landscaping, yes. Untreated canal water then dries onto glass sitting in full sun at elevated temperature, which bakes the mineral on much harder than it would set on a window.
Yes. Every opaque or translucent spot shades the cell beneath it, and panels are least tolerant of shading because they interact within a string. A stippled pattern of hard water spots across an array is a distributed shading problem, not just an appearance issue.
Yes, free of charge while we are on site. If a head is throwing onto your array the mineral returns within weeks of any cleaning, so a five-minute adjustment is worth more to you than a recurring clean. On a low single-story array that is often the whole answer.
Please do not wipe panels. Any dry contact risks dragging grit across the anti-reflective coating, which permanently reduces output, and baked-on mineral will not come off by wiping anyway. Panels are flooded with deionized water rather than wiped.
Quoted by array size, so on the modest arrays typical of these compact Lennar plans the number is correspondingly modest. We look at mounting and access before quoting rather than applying a flat per-panel rate.
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