How often should solar panels be serviced?

We recommend a full service with a deep clean every two years, and a panel wash every six to twelve months in between. Two years is also the interval the federal government’s guidance suggests. Homes near the coast, under trees or on a low-pitch roof belong at the six-month end for washing.

What does a solar service include?

An electrical check of every string, the DC wiring, the isolators and connectors, the inverter, the switchboard and the earthing. An inspection of the panels and mounts on the roof. A deep clean of the panels. A check of the battery if there is one. Then the findings and the readings in writing.

How much does solar panel servicing cost?

It depends on the number of panels, the roof, whether there is a battery and whether it is a full service or a wash. You get the price on the phone before we book. If the service finds a fault, you get a written quote before any repair.

Do solar panels really need cleaning?

Rain does some of it. What it leaves is the film that bakes on: salt, grime, pollen, lichen along the bottom of the frame and bird droppings. A deep clean every two years deals with that, and dirty sites benefit from a wash every six to twelve months.

Can I clean my own solar panels?

From the ground with a hose on a cool morning, there’s little harm. Getting on the roof is where people get hurt, and pressure washers and harsh cleaners can damage panels. The federal guidance is that only a qualified person should clean them.

Do solar batteries need maintenance?

A little. Vents and clearances kept clear, the enclosure sealed, firmware current and the backup changeover tested. We service the battery in the same visit as the panels and inverter.

What is the 20% rule for solar panels?

It is not an Australian rule. The phrase comes from American websites, where it describes sizing a system about 20 percent bigger than your usage. The closest thing here is the usual panel performance warranty, which allows output to fall to about 80 percent by year 25.

Will a service affect my warranty?

It helps it. Warranties assume the system has been looked after to the maker’s instructions, and a dated report from a licensed electrician is the simplest proof. Keep it with your warranty papers.

Do you service systems you did not install?

Yes, any brand, including systems whose installer has closed and inverter brands that have left Australia. The tests are the same on every system.

What is the difference between a service, fault finding and a repair?

A service checks a system that is working. Fault finding finds the cause when one has stopped or dropped. A repair fixes it. A regular service is how you catch the small things before they need the other two.

Solar Maintenance and Servicing | Deionno Electrical & Solar

Solar panel maintenance is a check on a system that is still working

Most solar systems never get looked at again after the day they are switched on. They sit on the roof through ten summers of heat, storms, dust and birds, and the first anyone hears of a problem is a higher bill. A solar service is the opposite of that. An electrician tests the system while it is still running, cleans the panels properly, and writes down what they measured so there is something to compare against next time.

For ten years Deionno Electrical & Solar has been installing and looking after solar across Adelaide, and we now do the same on the Sunshine Coast. Every service is done by one of our own licensed electricians, on any brand of panel, inverter or battery, whether we installed it or not. If your system has already stopped or is throwing a fault, that’s a different job: start with solar fault finding.

Does a solar system need servicing?

Solar needs very little maintenance, but it does need some. A system has no moving parts. What it has are DC isolators sitting in the weather, plugs under every panel, cable clipped to rails, and an inverter working hard on the hottest days of the year. Those are the parts that age.

The federal government’s own advice is that a system should be looked over by an accredited installer or a licensed electrician, and that the visit should cover cleaning, clearing around and under the panels, testing the electrical components, inspecting cables and isolators, and reading the inverter’s fault history [1]. The Queensland Government says the same and adds that the work up close has to be done by a licensed electrician or an accredited installer, not the homeowner [2].

A service is for a system that looks fine from the ground. Once something has gone wrong, the job becomes fault finding, to find the cause, and then a repair.

How often solar panels should be serviced

We work to a simple schedule.

A full service every two years. The electrical check, the inspection on the roof and at the switchboard, and a deep clean of the panels. Two years is also the interval the federal guidance suggests [1].
A panel wash every six to twelve months. Six months where the panels get dirty quickly, twelve where they do not.

What moves a home toward the shorter end: living near the beach, where salt settles on the glass and works on isolators and fixings; trees overhead; birds; a roof pitch too flat for rain to rinse the panels; and a system old enough that its isolators and connectors are into the second half of their life.

What a solar service checks

One of our electricians works through the system in the same order every time.

The panels and their mounts. Cracked glass, hot spots, lifted clamps, corrosion on the rails, and anything living underneath.
DC isolators and connectors. Opened and checked for water, heat marks and brittle seals. Water getting into rooftop isolators is one of the faults the Clean Energy Regulator’s inspectors keep finding.
Cabling. Cable that has slipped off the rails and is rubbing on the roof, conduit that has gone brittle in the sun, and penetrations that have lost their seal.
The inverter. Fault history, fan and vents, error codes that came and went without anyone noticing, and whether the monitoring is still reporting.
The switchboard. The solar breaker, its connections, the earthing and the labels.
The shutdown procedure. That it is displayed beside the inverter and still readable, as the Queensland checklist asks [2].
The area around the system. New shade from a tree or a neighbour’s extension, and anything stored against the inverter or battery.

New black solar panels on a terracotta tile roof in Hillbank, South Australia — Hillbank: twelve ageing 260 W panels came off this roof and ten new 440 W panels went on. Panels near the end of their life are often spotted at a service, before they fail.

What we measure, and what you get in writing

Looking is half of a service. The other half is measuring, because most of what goes wrong with solar cannot be seen.

We test each string of panels for the voltage and current it should be giving in that light, test the insulation of the DC wiring for leaks to earth, and read the grid voltage at the inverter. A string that disagrees with its neighbours, or an insulation reading that has dropped, is a fault on its way.

You get the findings in writing: what was checked, what was measured, anything to keep an eye on, and anything that needs doing. Keep it. The readings are a baseline, and at the next service the first thing we do is compare. A slow drift shows up on paper long before it shows up on a bill.

Solar panel cleaning: how often, and who should do it

We clean panels, and we’ll tell you how often yours need it.

Rain does part of the job on a roof with a decent pitch. What it leaves behind is the film that bakes on: salt, traffic grime, pollen, lichen along the bottom edge of the frame, and bird droppings, which shade a cell completely and can cook it. That is what the deep clean at the two-year service is for. Between services, a wash every six to twelve months keeps a dirty site producing.

The government’s advice is that only a qualified person should clean panels [1], and it’s good advice. The real risks are the roof itself and the temptation to reach for a pressure washer or a harsh cleaner, both of which can damage a panel and neither of which a panel warranty will thank you for.

Inverter, monitoring and grid settings

The inverter is the part most likely to be replaced before the panels are, so it gets its own attention: the event log, the temperature it has been running at, the firmware, and whether the app is still showing true production or just the last number it received before the Wi-Fi changed.

There’s also a compliance side. In South Australia the network’s technical standard makes the owner responsible for keeping the system safe and in good working order, and requires the inverter’s two voltage response modes to stay switched on [3]. Energex sets the same two modes as a condition of connection in South East Queensland [4]. Settings can change when an inverter is replaced or reset, so we check them at every service.

A Sungrow solar inverter on a shed wall in Hope Valley with its shutdown procedure label below the display — Hope Valley: a Sungrow inverter with its shutdown procedure label. Checking that the label is there and readable is on the Queensland Government’s inspection list, and on ours.

Solar battery maintenance

Yes, we service batteries, and we do it in the same visit.

A home battery needs less looking after than people expect. We check that its vents are clear and nothing has been stored on top of it or against it, that the enclosure and cable entries are sealed, that insects have not moved in, that the firmware is current, and that the app’s record of charge and discharge looks like a healthy battery. Where the battery runs a backup circuit, we test the changeover, because the worst time to find out it does not work is during a blackout.

The Queensland Government’s battery guidance is to ask your installer at handover what maintenance the battery needs, when, and who should do it [5]. If nobody told you, we can.

Servicing a solar system we did not install

Plenty of the systems we service were put in by someone else, and some of those installers have since closed. The service doesn’t change. Every brand gets the same tests. The one thing that differs is the inverter’s fault code table, and we keep those tables for 31 brands, the ones that have left Australia among them. Our free inverter fault code lookup uses the same tables.

If the brand no longer trades here, the report says so plainly, because that changes your options if a part ever fails.

Solar servicing and your warranties

Panel and inverter warranties are written around a system that has been installed and looked after to the maker’s instructions. A dated service report from a licensed electrician is the simplest proof that yours has been. It is also the first thing we reach for if we are helping you with a warranty claim, on a system of ours or anyone else’s.

What a solar service costs

A service is a booked, paid visit, and you get the price before we book it. It depends on the number of panels, the roof (height, pitch and access), whether there is a battery, and whether it is the full two-year service or a wash.

If the service turns up a fault, you get the finding and a written quote before anything is repaired. A callout to a system that has already stopped works differently: the diagnosis over the phone costs nothing, and if we come out there is a callout fee that comes off the price of any repair, replacement or other work we do.

Solar panel maintenance in Adelaide and on the Sunshine Coast

Adelaide and South Australia

Adelaide’s mix is long dry summers, dust, and the storms that end them. Plenty of systems from the first wave of installs are now old enough for their isolators and connectors to start failing, and a service is where that gets caught. We service the metro area, the Hills, the Fleurieu and the Barossa from our Salisbury Plain base, and the Adelaide solar repairs page covers the rest of what we do there.

Sunshine Coast and South East Queensland

On the Coast the enemies are salt and water. Salt air works on fixings and isolators near the beach, the wet season finds every tired seal, and panels on low-pitch roofs grow a line of lichen along the bottom edge. Homes within a few streets of the water belong on the six-month wash. We service from Caloundra to Noosa, the hinterland, Gympie and north Brisbane out of our Corbould Park base, and the Sunshine Coast solar repairs page covers the rest of what we do there.