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Solar Panel Cleaning Tucson
Solar energy is an excellent investment for Tucson homeowners, offering long-term savings and eco-friendly energy solutions. However, maintaining your solar panels is critical to ensuring they operate at peak efficiency. The dusty desert climate in Tucson can significantly reduce the performance of solar panels, making regular cleaning essential. In this article, we’ll explore why cleaning your solar panels at least once or twice a year is crucial and how much you could save by maintaining their efficiency.
If you had a black car and didn’t wash it for a year, what would it look like? Dirty! Well, the same is true for black solar panels. Tucson’s desert environment presents unique challenges for solar panel maintenance. Dust, pollen, bird droppings, and other debris accumulate on solar panels, blocking sunlight and reducing their efficiency. Studies show that dirty solar panels can lose up to 20-30% of their efficiency, directly impacting energy production and your overall savings. In fact, one Standford study showed that after three months, under th right conditions in the desert region, panels can lose 18% of their efficiency. After one year of not cleaning the panels they can be very dirty!
Tucson dust storms paired with all the local construction is the perfect recipe for dirty solar panels. All that dirt in the air can deposit layers of fine particles on solar panels. This creates a barrier between the sunlight and the photovoltaic cells, diminishing their ability to generate electricity. Even a light layer of dust can reduce efficiency by 7%, and heavier accumulation can lead to losses of 20-40% or more. In extreme cases, neglecting regular cleaning can cause permanent damage to the panels.
To understand the financial impact of cleaning your solar panels, let’s look at the numbers. Most solar energy panels produce from 250-400 watts of energy. So to average, let’s say a typical solar panel produces 300 watts (0.3 kW) of power. Tucson receives about 6-6.5 peak hours of sunlight during the day. At 6 hours of sunlight per day in Tucson, a 300 watt solar panel produces approximately 657 kWh per year per panel at peak efficiency. While the price fluctuates, Tucson Electric Power paid homeowners with solar energy panels $0.0633/kWh in 2024. So a typical 300W panel saves a home owner $81.09/year in energy sell back to TEP. With these numbers in mind, here are the losses for not cleaning your solar panels:
The above numbers are just for a guide for the savings a homeowner can achieve through solar panel cleaning. Many of the new panels actually produce more energy and many of the homes have more than 20 panels, so the cost of energy loss could be much higher.
Many experts recommend cleaning your solar panels at least once or twice a year to maintain their efficiency. In particularly dusty regions like Tucson, quarterly cleanings may be more effective. Regular maintenance ensures your panels stay clean and free from debris that could degrade their performance.
The key to cleaning solar panels is to make sure that they are completely streak free and without water spots when completed. The water in Tucson is extremely hard and has a significant amount of calc. So if you use regular water and don’t immediately dry the panels, they will have hard water spots on the panels. That is why it is important to use ultra-pure water to clean the solar energy panels.
Most professional solar cleaning companies use ultra-pure water to clean the energy panels. Desert Sky Roofing uses an advanced reverse osmosis deionization system that takes all the calc out of the water. This sytem ensure that when the panels dry they will not have streaks and they will not have hard water spots. The system we use includes soft bristle brushes with a 27′ pole so that we can reach all the panels safely.
For solar panels with paint overspray, hard water spots, or other debris, we use special cleaners formulated for solar panels so that they do not harm the panels. Desert Sky Roofing takes every precaution to make sure that your energy panels are cleaned correctly.
While it’s possible to clean your solar panels yourself, professional services offer several advantages:
Many homeowners purchase their solar system and forget about it. Unfortunately, by neglecting your solar panels and properly maintaining them, they could end up losing money from their investment. Here are a few considerations on why it is important to regularly clean your solar panels.
Tucson homeowners and businesses can maximize their solar energy savings and their’s system lifespan by scheduling regular solar panel cleaning services with Desert Sky Roofing. The dusty desert environment poses unique challenges, but with professional help from a professional roofing contractory in Tucson, your panels will operate at peak efficiency year-round. We can clean your residential solar panels or your commercial solar panels alike. We have a fast turn around and set prices so give us a call today to get your solar panels cleaned the right way!