Cleaning Solar Panels
Why clean your panels every year?? Check out this video to see, how a simple 5 minute cleaning can significantly boost your power output! These are also some of the highest quality 100W available panels available in the USA today. You can purchase them directly at: https://www.amazon.com/RPS-Monocrystalline-Solar-Battery-Charging/dp/B07JLSX21Z We hooked up a dirty solar panel to a constant voltage DC electronic load. We set the voltage to 36V and found that our dirty panels were outputting about 4 Amps which is equivalent to about 145 Watts. Once we cleaned the panels, we saw in increase to 5.1 Amps (183 Watts), which is the full power you can expect in typical conditions. The amperage data was linearly mapped to a visual power meter to show the decrease or increase in power in real time. The dirty panels were outputting 26% less power than when fully clean.
hi this mic I’m out here in front of the RPS warehouse and today I’m going to talk about why it’s important to clean your solar panels so we have a panel here this is 2 100 watt panels this comes with our RPS 200 kit and as you can see it’s been outside for a couple of months now and it’s a little dirty we have some dust and dirt we have some bird poop on it and I want to show you how this is affecting your power output now your panels don’t have to be cleaned all that often we’re talking every three to six months or so that’d be every four or two times a year to clean up your panels but it can help produce more power and if you’re not cleaning them regularly you’re throwing that power away and either you’re not producing the power to provide to the utility grid or in our case you’re not using that power to pump extra water we have the panels running over to a constant current load meter so what that meter is doing is it’s adjusting the current in order to maintain the proper voltage and right now we have it set at right about 36 volts and if you take a look over there we are producing around 145 watts of power and so out of 200 watts a nice sunny day we should be producing more like 180 to 190 watts of power so as you can see we have degraded the amount of power producing due to the debris dust and dirt on this panel okay so let’s get cleaning as you can see on the meter we’re in constant voltage mode so that means the load is going to maintain 36 volts and it’s going to adjust the current up and down in order to maintain that constant voltage so as you’ll see a higher current means we’re getting more power to the panels and a lower current means we’re getting less power out of the panel’s so it does not take much to clean these panels let’s start with a wash cloth and get everything nice and wet in another video we used a mop or a broom that works just as well but here since we’re at ground level and just use a rag so there’s some thick stuff on there I’ll start with just kind of scraping it off so I will get it loosened up let’s easier to get off
so one of the big problems with mounting solar panels is birds are gonna love to sit up on the top and you know what comes after that and so if you’re in an area with a lot of birds you’re doing that one is you’re gonna want to clean your panels a little more often every couple of months or you’re gonna want to try to put like a bird strip or spikes up on top to help prevent them from sitting up there ultimately it’s not a huge problem so just washing them a little more often
so the solar panels are sealed the solar cells are behind a layer of glass and they also have a laminate on the back of the panel so water is not going to hear them so don’t be shy getting your panels nice and wet in order to clean
all right so as you can see it’s looking pretty good here we’re not going for perfection we’re just trying to get the big pieces of dirt dust and debris off in order to increase our power output
alright those are looking pretty good took about five minutes and we have our panels pretty clean here normally you can just let them drip dry right now I’m going to give them a quick wipe off so we can go back and check the power meter to see how we did here
okay so we’ve got our solar panels clean they’re looking pretty good here and I just took a look over at the meter and what we’re doing is at 36 volts we’re doing about 5.1 amps which is 183 watts of power and so that is a 26% increase just from about five minutes of cleaning these panels it didn’t take much and over the next three months we’re gonna be producing about 25% more power that’s every day six hours a day which can be a significant increase if you’re trying to utilize the maximum production of your system so a quick cleaning here gave us a significant increase in power if you’re interested in the solar well pump visit us at RPS solar pumps comm also check out our youtube channel we’re coming out with new tutorials every week about solar panels and how to maintain them and how to size your systems
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RPS is a family-owned company of laser-focused mechanical, electrical and software engineers that live and breathe solar pumping almost every hour of every day. We have sales offices in a number of states now, but our main shop has moved to an Ag town in California (we do get poked fun of for this!) and our warehouse to move there shortly. We put great time, money and thought into our kits – including parts and components to make installation a breeze. Our reading materials, manuals, videos and diagrams allow customers of all skill levels to install a solar pump successfully the first time. As has become famous, we also offer a direct line to talk with real humans! ..our actual pump engineers for asking questions, helping troubleshoot, or planning for installation.
