Solar Panel Cleaning in Newtown

A terrace about 4 metres wide has very little roof to give to solar, and on a heritage street much of what it has faces the front. That leaves the rear roof plane or the roof over the back wing, where panels can sit out of sight. Out of sight also means out of mind: owners rarely see the glass, and the first sign of a dirty array is often a dip in output.

What settles on those panels depends on where you are. Homes close to King Street, which carries Princes Highway traffic through the suburb, sit beside a steady source of exhaust soot and fine road grime that dries onto glass as a dull film. Near Camperdown Memorial Rest Park, Salmon Park or Enmore Park, the large figs and other mature trees add leaf fragments and pollen, and droppings can land on any array regardless of location. Unlike a thin film of dust, a dropping is opaque and blocks the light to the cells beneath it.

Strata buildings, including the walk-up flats and tower blocks built from the late 1960s onwards, may carry arrays on flat or low-pitched roofs, where dust has less chance of rinsing off in rain.

Cleaning uses purified water with no detergent, which dries spot-free and is gentle on the glass and its coatings.

On a big suburban roof, a little lost output is spread across a large array. On a Newtown terrace, where heritage rules and a narrow roof may restrict a system to a handful of panels on the rear plane, each panel carries more of the household's load, so a grime film or a cluster of droppings matters more.

Washing with purified water instead of detergent means nothing is left behind on the glass. Purified water dries without spots and protects the coatings applied to panel glass, so the clean itself does not create a new layer for dust to cling to.

Because the arrays are tucked away, before-and-after photos are often the only clear view an owner gets of their own panels. They show how much soot, pollen and fouling had built up and what the glass looks like afterwards, which is useful when comparing generation figures before and after a clean.

For strata committees and landlords, those photos also serve as a record. With almost 40 percent of Newtown's occupied homes being flats or apartments at the 2021 Census, plenty of arrays here belong to an owners corporation rather than a single household, and a documented clean is easy to report back on.