13 Standard Stages in Solar Panel Cleaning
Carla Dawson
December 13, 2022Understand the process, make better decisions, and grow your business.
- Safety – Before we get started, how can we ensure operator and bystander safety? Let’s be “safe-centric”.
- PV Site Damage Control – Before we get started, how can we ensure that we will not damage the PV site? Thermal shock ..etc
- Arrival / Setup – Once we arrive at the job site with our equipment, how do we get set up? What resources do we need to get to work? How does the machinery we have performed in this stage?
- Transportation – How do we move the equipment from the company warehouse or home base to the job site and vice versa?
- Water Treatment – How do we treat our water? Do we do this at the job site or do we do it at a company warehouse and then transport the treated water?
- Water Management – How do we get the water from the source to the machinery and solar panels? How do we handle the long hoses and what tools can we use to make this handling easier and more efficient? Do we need to refill the source?
- Array (Row) Cleaning – Once we get the equipment set up and the machinery is on the array, how well do we perform the cleaning?
- How many trips to clean the array?
- Water consumption per trip?
- Gap Management – It is common that solar installations to have gaps within the array or row. How does the solar panel cleaning equipment cross that gap and will it be a problem? Gaps can be problematic and there are workarounds.
- Row to Row (Moving from one array to another) – How do we move the machinery from one row to the next? Rows/arrays are constant in every solar panel cleaning job and each installation requires that you solve the problem in a tailored way.
- Equipment Power Management – How is our equipment powered and how can we ensure constant and efficient power so we do not have to stop working?
- Departure (Basically the same as Arrival / Setup) but not always the same.
- Transportation – Time to go home or to the next job site!
- Equipment Maintenance – Maintaining the equipment after each job is a fundamental step to guaranteeing success.
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About the author
Carla Dawson founded Soilar Technologies, a NextGen PV Soiling Mitigation Technology Company in 2019.
NextGen PV soiling mitigation can be defined as:
“Mitigating photovoltaic soiling by using 21st-century technologies throughout the solar plant lifecycle with the objective of increasing performance, reliability, asset life, and warranty compliance. NextGen PV Soiling mitigation is typically a data-enriched smart system that combines technologies such as solar panel cleaning robotics, PV anti-soiling coatings, PV abrasion testing, bird deterrent solutions, PV soil monitoring, electrodynamic shields (EDS), condensation prevention, tracker/stowage position, and cleaning schedule optimization, solar panel cleaning software, analytics and other technologies.”
NextGen PV soiling mitigation is a phrase that was coined by Carla Dawson and Klemens Ilse in 2022.
Soilar Technologies is dedicated to helping solar panel cleaners, EPC, solar installation companies, and entrepreneurs solve their PV soiling problems from design to the operations and maintenance stage.
