CLEANER IS GREENER
Shine Up Solar cares about the environment. We pride ourselves on being a green cleaning company which means we use only water and elbow grease for 99% of our cleanings, and in a rare case we use environmentally friendly cleaning products when cleaning difficult things like oil, tar, or chemicals from agriculture.
We are water-conscious because we live in California and clean all over the South West United States. We are very aware of our dwindling precious natural resource. The last few years, prior to 2017, were some of the hottest and driest on record. We took the drought into consideration when performing cleanings.
We have made huge gains in decreasing the amount of water we use to clean a solar panel. We used to use over a gallon per module in 2012 to under a quart in 2017. With our patent pending brush technology we are dropping costs and saving water one stroke of the brush or genius at a time. We are constantly improving on our brush technology and methods. If you do not have access to water we can dust the modules.
This is about 2-8% less effective and the labor is about 25% longer. However, if you do not have access to water or it is cost prohibitive to truck and transport it is still a very good option and will increase your efficiency. We see gains of electrical output to about 92-98% of what it would be if it were brand new and had no soiling. With water getting to be more and more scarce this may become a more interesting option for our clients.
CLEANING SOLAR PANELS FOR A CLEANER FUTURE
Think about how much carbon and other harmful pollutants Shine Up Solar is preventing from going up into our atmosphere? We are part of the Green Revolution. We clean millions of solar panels a year. Let’s say an average 300kw panel creates 200 KWh hours of electricity a year. If the average soiling level across 10,000,000 panels is 15% decrease then that is a loss of 10,000,000 X 200KWh = 2 Billion KWh and 15% 300,000,000 KWh additional we are putting back on to the green grid.
That is enough electricity to power about 300,000 average homes for a year! Shine Up Solar wants to make a difference in your bottom line and the Earth’s! When solar sales companies put together a sales presentation they have algorithms that compute how much electricity is going to be produced by the system. They project that it will produce so many kilowatt hours, and they typically guarantee that. Inside their agreements they will repair anything that breaks, but they will not normally include cleaning.
That is the customers job. By cleaning the solar modules and cutting the weeds that shade them we are increasing the green electrical out put and decreasing the demand for fossil or nuclear fuels. Let’s just imagine you have a system that is supposed to produce $1000 of clean green electricity a year, and it does so the first year.
Then in year two you notice that your bills are a little higher. You check your usage and your kilowatt hour usage is the same. You then go look at your modules and see they are covered in a layer of dust, pollen and bird poop. You only produced $700 of electricity in year 2.
In “green” money terms you are not happy. However, in “green” earthly terms mother nature is not happy either. That loss in $300 from your array means you had to buy $300 more electricity from the utility that burns coal, natural gas, or other things that emit CO2, NO2, NOX or other things that warm our earth. Cleaning your system regularly for that example on a small residential system it would have only cost the customer $120-140. It would have paid for it’s self and been like planting dozens of trees that year.
The amount of carbon that a few dozen trees ingest from photosynthesis is equivalent to the amount of carbon that was pumped into our atmosphere to make up for that little $300 decrease in your annual electrical budget that the utility gladly excepted thanks to good old dust, pollen and bird poop.