Solar and battery aftercare

Chasing down a drop in generation

Panels themselves rarely fail. They degrade slowly, typically well under one percent a year, and a twelve year old module is usually still doing very close to what it always did. So when generation falls away, the cause is almost always somewhere else in the system, and once it has been found it is usually cheap to put right. The expensive part is guessing instead of testing.

The common culprits are a tripped DC or AC isolator, a failed inverter cooling fan, a corroded connector on a roof where the joints were never made off properly, or a string gone open circuit at one point and taking a whole row with it. Growth is another one. A sapling planted the same year as the panels is a shading problem eight years later, and nobody ever connects the two things.

Then there is dirt. In this county that mostly means agricultural dust and, above all, bird mess. A panel on a decent pitch does not need washing every year, since rain does most of the work for you, but a shallow pitch with a build up along the bottom edge of the cells will cost you genuine output, and a clean is far cheaper than assuming the system has broken.

Inverter life, monitoring and bird proofing

The inverter is the component with a finite life. It is the only part switching constantly, it runs warm, and its capacitors and cooling fans wear out in the ordinary way. Somewhere between ten and fifteen years is a fair expectation, and rather less if it was mounted in a hot loft or on a wall in direct sun. Replacement is straightforward work, and it is a sensible moment to weigh up whether a hybrid unit and a battery now make sense.

Monitoring is the cheapest fault finding there is, and a surprising number of systems either never had it configured or lost it when the household changed broadband router. Set up properly, it tells you a string has dropped within a day or so, rather than at the next annual bill. We will get it reconnected and show you what normal looks like for your particular system, so you stand a chance of spotting abnormal.

Bird proofing deserves a mention of its own. Pigeons and gulls nest in the gap between the modules and the tiles, and once they are established you get droppings down the roof, blocked gutters, chewed cabling and a smell through the loft. Mesh clipped around the module frames along the perimeter stops it, and it is a much easier job before they move in than after.

Taking on a system installed by somebody else

We service arrays we did not install, which matters in a market where a fair number of installers have gone under. Coming to a system cold, we start with whatever paperwork exists, then work through the physical check, being the DC and AC sides, the isolators, the earthing and bonding, the connectors, the mounting fixings and the roof penetrations.

What we cannot do is retrospectively issue an MCS certificate for an installation that was never registered, and anyone telling you otherwise is not being straight with you. What we can do is test it thoroughly, tell you honestly what condition it is in, put right whatever needs putting right, and issue proper electrical certification for the work we carry out. Where a system is beyond economic repair we will say that too, instead of selling you a service plan for it.