Solar Maintenance & Cleaning

For most coastal and suburban homes, once a year is plenty; near farms, mills, heavy traffic or salt spray it can be twice. Rain helps but does not clear bird mess, pollen or grime on a low-pitch roof. We check the soiling and the output and tell you honestly whether a clean is worth it for your site.

Yes. A lot of our maintenance work is on systems installed by companies that have since vanished, which is common in solar. We test the array and inverter on any brand, find the fault, and tell you whether it is a repair, a part, or an ageing system worth replacing.

Start by checking the inverter screen or app for a fault code and that the solar supply main switch is on. If it is showing an error or nothing at all, do not poke around a live DC array, book a health check. We diagnose the inverter, the strings and the isolators, and quote any repair before we do it.

Monitoring is the honest answer, and most systems have it but it is never set up. We connect or fix your monitoring so you can see daily generation against what the system should make, and on a maintenance plan we watch it for you and call when it drops.

It can be, on two counts: the roof, and the array. Walking a wet or steep roof is a real fall risk, and a panel with a hidden fault can carry dangerous DC voltage. We have the height-safety gear and the testing to do it safely, which is usually cheaper than the alternative.

A residential clean and health check is typically in the $180 to $450 range depending on roof access and system size, and we measure output before and after so you see what it recovered. A fault diagnosis is quoted once we have tested the array and inverter, and any repair is priced before we do it, never a surprise on the invoice.

Monitoring tells us quickly. Output naturally dips on overcast days and in winter, but a genuine fault, a dead string, a tripped or failing inverter, soiling, shows a different pattern in the data. We read your monitoring, test on site if needed, and tell you honestly whether it is weather, a clean, or a repair.

A bit, yes. Salt build-up on coastal homes around Tweed, Byron and Ballina can cut output and, over years, attack poorly-specified mounting and isolators. A regular clean and a check of the corrosion-rated hardware keeps a coastal system performing, which is part of why we spec for the salt zone at install in the first place.