Written to be useful whether or not you hire us
These guides explain how to choose a cleaning interval, respond to pigeons beneath panels and assess claims about production gains. Each starts with the customer decision and explains which property details can change the answer.
Several of them tell you how to avoid spending money with us. How to read your own production data. How to recognize when a production concern needs diagnosis. When an array does not need cleaning yet. What to check before accepting any quote, including ours. That is deliberate. A customer who understands the work is easier to serve and harder to mislead.
What the guides cover
Three guides cover cleaning intervals, bird exclusion and production comparisons. They explain what to ask before booking and where a visual observation cannot settle the answer.
Scroll sideways to see all columns.
| Guide | The question it answers | Read it if |
|---|---|---|
| Pigeons Under Solar Panels | Why pigeon removal alone fails, and what real bird proofing involves | You hear cooing or scratching, or see droppings on the roof |
| How Often Should You Clean Solar Panels | How to set your own cleaning interval from production data | You were quoted a calendar schedule with no reference to your roof |
| Does Cleaning Increase Output | What cleaning does for production, and how to measure it yourself | You saw a percentage in an ad and want the truth |
How to tell a useful guide from a sales page
Most of what is published about solar cleaning exists to produce a booking. The tell is a confident percentage: a specific figure for how much output you are losing, quoted with no reference to your tilt, your dust, your soiling pattern or how long since it rained. Nobody knows that from a web page. The honest version is always "it depends", followed by what it depends on.
The second tell is what a page refuses to say. A guide that never mentions when cleaning is not worth doing, never separates soiling from an electrical fault, and never suggests checking your own data first is not written to inform you. These guides say all three.
What is not covered, and where to go instead
These guides stop at the edge of the trade. Anything electrical on a solar system belongs with a licensed solar contractor: an unexplained production drop, inverter error codes, discoloration or burning at a connection, damaged conduit, cracked or delaminated modules. No cleaning advice substitutes for a diagnosis. The Department of Energy publishes operations and maintenance material that is a better starting point than any contractor blog.
Same for roofing. CA Solar Wash washes roofs. The team does not repair them. If a guide helps you identify a cracked tile, lifted flashing, a soft deck or an active leak, that is a roofer's job, and cleaning first can hide the damage instead of revealing it. When the work turns up something in either category, you get a photograph and the name of the trade it belongs to.
About the numbers you see elsewhere
Search for solar panel cleaning and you will find output-loss percentages across an enormous range. Some come from real research in extreme environments, such as desert installations beside unpaved roads, industrial sites and regions with dust storms, where the findings are true and do not transfer to a suburban Valley rooftop. Others are repeated from one marketing page to the next until they sound like fact.
Our position is simple. The mechanism is well established. The magnitude is site-specific. So we describe the first and describe the limits of measuring the second instead of quoting a figure nobody measured on your roof. Want your own number? The output guide explains how to compare monitoring records and why even clear-day changes cannot all be attributed to cleaning.
