Engineers from the University of California, San Diego, published their findings that it isn’t worth the money to hire someone to clean your solar powers in the July 25th issue of Solar Energy. Testing panels that hadn’t been cleaned or even rinsed for 145 days during a California drought, the engineers discovered that only 7.4% of the panels’ efficiency was lost. For a typical residential solar system, washing the panels halfway through the summer would earn about $20 in electricity gain until the typical drought ends. As the size of the system increases the energy and financial losses are greater, but rarely great enough to warrant the cost of having the panels cleaned.
Read the full article here: Cleaning Solar Panels Often Not Worth the Cost