My cleaning solution is 1/4 gallon white vinegar with a dash of Windex on top in the bucket water. The white vinegar acidity neutralized the alkaline hard water I have. No spots or residue on my panels after 5 years.
Lmao kemyers
Wow nice telescope you have there
Ps I wouldnât mind cleaning them panels for u lets say half price 2K 
Vinegar for hard water makes perfect sense good for showers tiles even hydroponics to good old vinegar.
Alkaline water and aluminium donât mix I wonder what the pollution in inner city areas would do to the aluminium frames in solar panels over time not good
I had a temp job once where the contractor went around to clean windows on just finished house construction to get the grime and sheetrock and stucco splatter off the windows. Back then dual pane energy efficient windows were all bare aluminum framed and we used nothing but white vinegar and Windex with water cleaning solution. After liberal razor blade scraping. Never had a problem with corrosion on the aluminum.
But all my solar panels are anodized aluminum frames anyway and the white vinegar doesnât faze them at all. The bare aluminum racking on the ground mount might get affected but as I said I use the flip mop and squeegee most of the water out of the mophead first after dunking in the wash bucket. Primarily to have as little runoff off the mophead as possible to not feed the weeds so very little of the acidic water is ever exposed to the panel frame in the first place.
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If you search for Truck or caravan cleaning broom you should find one. They have the hose fitting on the end with a valve to turn the water on/off and an extendable handle.
Nice idea Knobbage
Yes.
After three months of summer, a good hosing down will increase production by 5%.
Theyâd have to be pretty filthy for that much power loss. You might see 5% improvement immediately after a clean because the cleaning cools the panels but once they get back to normal operating temperature I doubt youâll get that much improvement.
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I clean mine first thing in the morning before the sun shines on them,so maybe at 8 deg C.and i can see a good improvement in output going forward in the next few weeks, over 1 Kw a day more and at some times of the year that would be 5% for my system
I barely saw a 1% increase after the initial clean and jump.
And panels looked bad.
Had a decent shower the other week and it looks as good as when i cleaned it.
I wasnât talking about spraying the grime off the panels while the sun was out and the production increasing because the panels were cooler. You should never water the panels when they are hot.
I was talking about a 5% increase in production on full sunny days of the same temperature AFTER the cleaning. That 5% number didnât fall from the sky, it came from looking at the PVOutput data.
A good way to judge how much power you are gaining by cleaning is to clean one group of panels and leave another group dirty. Then compare the output of each of these panels to the uncleaned panels. Using a random pairing of dirty and clean panels will eliminate some of the randomness of the power production while the panels are being irradiated with the same solar irradiance at the same time. This should work under most conditions and give an unbiased estimate of power gained by cleaning. Of course this would require an inverter which can give you individual panel data.
or if you have a inverter that can give you individual MPPT data it would also show you how much the difference there is ,clean against dirty panels has made, ie a Fronius inverter can do this
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