Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Should you wash your solar panels?

incoherency.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 259 posts

Re: Should you wash your solar panels?

#111

Post by WalterBright »

Archelaos wrote: post #62
wodenokoto wrote: post #6

> why would you clean them when you're about to sell the house? So they look good and the potential buyer sees something that looks to be in good condition and working well.

I would generalise this a little: The problem with buying a complex item is information inequality. The seller knows more about it than the potential buyer. When inspecting the item, the buyer therefore looks for signs of hidden defects or for evidence that the item is in good condition overall. In this way, cleanliness becomes a proxy for the general condition of the object. Similar mechanisms are at work elsewhere…

"Information inequality" is known as "risk". Risk is inherent in any transaction. That factors into the price: one is willing to pay less the more risk there is, and will pay more for less risk.

Re: Should you wash your solar panels?

#113

Post by WalterBright »

delusional wrote: post #36
wodenokoto wrote: post #6

> why would you clean them when you're about to sell the house? So they look good and the potential buyer sees something that looks to be in good condition and working well.

Exactly the same reason you should probably clean the rest of the house when you're selling it. Theoretically, the price of the house before cleaning should be equal to the value if the house after cleaning, minus whatever the cleaning costs. In reality, you'll get much less for your house without cleaning it, because human emotions.

> you'll get much less for your house without cleaning it, because human emotions

It's not because of emotions. It's because it correlates with other neglect that may be less obvious.

A good real estate agent has a rolodex of various contractors that can fix up a house to ready it for sale.

Re: Should you wash your solar panels?

#114

Post by WalterBright »

delichon wrote: post #52
delusional wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the same reason you should probably clean the rest of the house when you're selling it. Theoretically, the price of the house before cleaning should be equal to the value if the house after cleaning, minus whatever the cleaning costs. In reality, you'll get much less for your house without cleaning it, because human emotions.

We had a contractor doing repairs before we sold our house. Without being asked he took an orbital sander to the wooden hand railings along the stairs to the front door and said "people really notice this". A family came for the tour and before walking in the father put his hand on the rail, looked up at the house, and said "this place seems well maintained". Then they bought the house after a small pleasant (for us)…

A real estate agent told me that a customer decides to buy/not buy a house as soon as they put their hand on the front door knob. If he decides to buy, he'll look at the rest of the house looking for a reason not to.

I.e. putting in an expensive door knob is a good plan!

Re: Should you wash your solar panels?

#115

Post by tclancy »

bityard wrote: post #100
tclancy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, compared to what though? Compared to speaking to licensed electrician, definitely. But compared to doing a raw web search and trying to put the information in the right order for the application you’re currently working on, I think it’s at worst a wash.

> a wash Well done on this cleanly-executed pun.

Took four open weight models to land it. And you are giving me way more credit than I am due.

Re: Should you wash your solar panels?

#116

Post by rconti »

> This is the yin and yang of market-distorting incentives. Today's incentive to install solar becomes tomorrow's disincentive to upgrading it.

Facing this as well. We've got our 5.2kW system in a pile in our yard as the house is being enlarged, new roof going on, etc. We're switching from a gas furnace to a heat pump system, and will also be installing a hot tub. I'm sure our annual power bill will double from say $1k to $2k, but it doesn't make sense to enlarge our system.

I'm 8 years into a 20 year net metering scheme (NEM2.0 in CA), and any changes I make will kick me off the plan. In theory I am allowed to add up to 10% or 1kW, but in practice my solar company keeps telling me it's not worthwhile. I think the paperwork and administrative burden of even adding the amount I'm "allowed" to add just means it's not cost-effective.

Whether or not the utility actually would notice that I'm mysteriously getting 1kW additional generation (if no paperwork was filed) is another story.

Re: Should you wash your solar panels?

#117

Post by WalterBright »

austinl wrote: post #53
delusional wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the same reason you should probably clean the rest of the house when you're selling it. Theoretically, the price of the house before cleaning should be equal to the value if the house after cleaning, minus whatever the cleaning costs. In reality, you'll get much less for your house without cleaning it, because human emotions.

Having recently bought a house, I love thinking about things that increase perceived value relative to cost (more so because they're nice to have, not because we plan to sell any time soon). A few things we changed right away: - new mailbox (replacing a rusted 30+ year old one) - lots of landscaping work (the majority of which I can do myself) - installed a wine fridge (I always felt it gave the sense that the kitche…

Trump wrote in one of his books that a person selling their car that does not detail it beforehand is a fool.

Re: Should you wash your solar panels?

#118

Post by libria »

1123581321 wrote: post #3

Appreciate the attempts to quantify it. I haven't tried to quantify washing, but I do look at mine regularly. I doubt anything accumulates that rain doesn't handle well enough. Messing around with ground panels is lower risk and safer than roof panels where tool extenders and ladders start to become involved. If you have roof panels, you are the biggest danger to your panels (and yourself.) Don't try to clean them, s…

Now I want solar panels merely so I have a reason to not have to clean my roof

Re: Should you wash your solar panels?

#119

Post by scarecrowbob »

Horses for courses. My system is off grid, so any extra power is just not used, and its designed in a way that a 2-5% change doesn't do anything. That might be a more meaningful change if I were selling power to other folks.

Kind of off topic, but I see a lot of folks proximate to me have built systems to turn panels so they face the sun more closely. I can see the use in that if you don't have much space or if you have a large commercial operation, but this area is very rural.

My array (4kw) which I built myself has 10 400W panels. The panels cost me $1200 because the minimum order is 12 and the supplier suggested buying extras; shipping large panels one at a time isn't cheap. In fact, the shipping for the entire system (about $5000 worth of equipment) was almost $1000.

But my feeling is that for the cost of a moving array that tracks the sun / time of year would have cost quite a lot more and have involved construction that I personally wasn't comfortable with. The conclusion I came to is that it would cost about the same to build a second array, angle it for "summer" (mine is angled to be most efficient in winter), and hook it to the other MPPT on my controller.

That would take up a lot of space, but a) I am 40 acres and b) then I could run a mig welder with impunity during the day...

Re: Should you wash your solar panels?

#120

Post by sumtechguy »

the_sleaze_ wrote: post #77

Question for people here: my local power company charges a fee if solar is attached to the grid and is high enough to make installing residential solar impractical. I'm thinking the best thing to do would be put a large battery in between the grid and my home and selectively recharge the battery with the solar. I believe that setup circumvents the fee since the only thing using energy is the battery, as though it wer…

Having just put a battery into my existing system. For the power company I use the answer is no to your question. Many power companies charge that fee depending on the size of panels. Now if you do not hook to their system they do not care (off grid). But if you plug into it then they care and charge for the privilege.

Now you could pull particular items out of their grid. Just need the wires and panels to make sense. They would not care about that either. It is only if the panels are plugged into the grid they start to care. Downside is sometimes waiting for that battery to have enough juice to work. It goes faster than you think and some battery systems are decently expensive just by themselves, on top of the panels/inverters/controllers/install.

Post reply on HN