The maintenance an installation needs (and the kind it does not)

How often does a solar installation actually fail?

A well-built installation is boring: no moving parts, sealed equipment, it can run for years without trouble. The problem is that when it fails, it fails silently. A dead string makes no noise and triggers no alarm in your home: you simply produce less and the bill creeps up without you knowing why. That is why useful maintenance is not opening the box every month, but finding out the day something changes.

What does a maintenance visit check?

When we climb onto a roof to inspect, this is what gets looked at, with a written report at the end:

• Electrics: connection torque, connector and cable condition, protections, and thermography where it matters, because a hot spot today is a fault tomorrow.
• Structure and anchors: torque values, corrosion, the state of seals and of the tiles around every fixing.
• Panels: visible micro-cracks, ingrained dirt, abnormal degradation compared string against string.
• Inverter and monitoring: event logs, accumulated warnings, firmware versions and communications working.

How often do panels need cleaning?

In this area, rain does most of the work most of the year. Cleaning pays when the dirt is real and measurable: after Saharan dust episodes, on roofs beside fields that raise dust, or with persistent bird droppings. Cleaning because it is due, without production asking for it, is paying to wash a clean car. Our monitoring detects when production drops through soiling, and then yes, it gets cleaned and it shows.

The maintenance that works every day

The piece that turns maintenance from reactive into calm is daily monitoring: comparing each day's production against what was expected for that day. When the curve drifts, someone sees it and decides whether it is cloud, dirt or fault, and if a visit is needed, we arrive with the diagnosis already made. A physical inspection stops being a blind yearly ritual and becomes an intervention with a reason.

If your system was installed by someone else and left orphaned, we adopt it too: a first full inspection with a report, and from then on, watched like our own.

The faults that do turn up in local homes

When something fails in a domestic installation, it is almost never the panel. What shows up over the years is humbler: a badly crimped connector running hot, a terminal working loose with the cycles of heat and cold, the inverter fan clogged with the dust the fields throw up in summer. And then there is the wildlife: pigeons nesting under the panels and filling the roof with nests and mess, wasps setting up home in the mounting rails, the occasional rodent taking a liking to the cabling.

None of this brings the installation down overnight, and that is precisely the danger: a hot connector can spend months producing almost normally before it becomes a serious risk point, and an RCD that trips on humid days is usually warning you about insulation on its way out. These are exactly the things a proper inspection catches early: cheap to put right in time and very expensive to ignore.

These are the usual suspects we come across:

• DC connectors running hot or badly crimped from day one
• Mounting bolts loosened after windstorms
• Cable trays and ties degraded by the sun
• Pigeon nests under the panel array
• Inverter fan and grilles clogged with dust

What paperwork, warranties and insurance need keeping up to date?

The legal warranty on the installation is three years, and the manufacturer warranties on panels and inverters go much further, but claiming successfully depends on being able to prove what happened and when. The monitoring history is the best evidence there is: the exact date a panel started underperforming, how the inverter behaved in the weeks before it stopped. Without that record, the conversation with the manufacturer starts uphill.

The same goes for home insurance. After a hailstorm or a windstorm, the loss adjuster wants to compare the state before with the state after. Photos of the finished installation, the production history and a recent inspection report put that comparison on the table from day one. And a warning we always give: tell your insurer you have panels on the roof, because some policies require declaring them and it is far better to find out before the claim than after.

None of this demands folders of bureaucracy. It demands that someone keeps the project documents, the photos, the inspection reports and access to the monitoring, and that all of it can be found on the day it is needed. It is the part of maintenance you cannot see from the street, and the part that makes the difference when something goes wrong.

Frequently asked questions