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I'm curious what kind of maintenance costs and tasks are involved in running a solar plant of this size. Do the panels need replacing much, or cleaning?
by ufmace 13y ago
I'm curious what kind of maintenance costs and tasks are involved in running a solar plant of this size. Do the panels need replacing much, or cleaning?
- ChuckMcM 13y agoI'm going to guess cleaning, wiring repair when rodents damage it, and more cleaning. I've had a 5.2kW of panels on my roof in Sunnyvale for 12 years now and it is really obvious when you get water spots on them or dust. This is being mitigated by new panel architectures (micro-inverters so loss of a single panel doesn't affect the whole system) but its still a challenge.
- ufmace 13y agoCool, how's the cost on them working out? Have they broken even? Any impact from subsidies/tax breaks?
- ChuckMcM 13y agoI was part of the "first" California/Federal rebate/subsidy program. Depending on how you treat depreciation they have returned either 19 or 23% annually on their capital investment. Overall a solid investment even if they don't change the potential sale value of the house. At during the depths of the 2009 recession it was a much better return than my 401k portfolio. I'm considering replacing them with the latest technology. That cost/efficiency I believe I can boost them to 7.8kW raw conversion on the same mounts. I may also be able to boost total efficiency with some of the newer modes (mine are connected serially into high voltage strings, vs today where they are more commonly a set of parallel micro-inverters.