Published 13 Jul 2023
What is a Solar Panel Maintenance Checklist?
A solar panel maintenance checklist is a tool used to help maintain the upkeep of solar panels. It helps ensure that your solar panels are in good working order and free from issues, breakages, and defects.
In this article
- Importance of Regularly Maintaining Your Solar Panels
- Common Maintenance Tasks
- What Should a Solar Panel Maintenance Checklist Include
- Common Solar Panel Issues and Fixes
- FAQs about Solar Panel Maintenance Checklists
- Ensure Effective Solar Panels with a Smart Digital Solution
- Related Solar Panel Maintenance Checklists
Importance of Regularly Maintaining Your Solar Panels
All solar panels are designed to endure various harsh weather conditions, but are still prone to breakages and wear and tear. With dust, dirt, bird droppings, and other environmental factors accumulating on the surface, their efficiency can slowly be reduced, affecting their performance. Even small defects like micro cracks can hinder the panels’ ability to generate electricity.
Regular maintenance and preventive maintenance can help address these issues promptly, preventing potential damage and optimizing energy output. Maintenance can also increase the lifespan of your solar panels, making it a long-term investment for you and those around you who benefit from it. It also helps you save on extra costs, as it can prevent energy loss.
Conducting maintenance also helps improve the safety of your workers and others who may be passing by them, under them, or around them regularly. By inspecting for possible debris, broken or loose wires, and other hazards, you can create the proper safety measures to counter them and keep people away from injuries or illnesses.
However, there are many parts to a solar panel to be aware of. For this reason, a solar panel preventive maintenance checklist or a general solar panel maintenance checklist can be a great help. Having a checklist can help ensure all maintenance tasks are performed well and on time, as well as record all findings you may encounter while doing so.
Common Maintenance Tasks
The most common solar panel maintenance tasks include the following:
- Inspecting visual appearances
- Cleaning
- Shading maintenance
- Detecting cracks
- Monitoring performance
What Should a Solar Panel Maintenance Checklist Include
Following the most common maintenance tasks for solar panels, a typical general solar panel maintenance checklist includes fields for the following:
- Date and time maintenance is being performed
- Location
- Warranty check
- Last time cleaning was performed
- List of cleaning tasks to be done and completed
- List of obstructions to be aware of
- Damages to solar panels observed
- Status of different boxes, wirings, enclosures, and fuses
- Maintence tasks to be done in general and specific terms
The end of the solar panel maintenance checklists should be finished off a sign off section, which includes the name of the inspector or maintenance personnel and their signature. In some cases, the names and signatures of other workers may also be included. These are not required, but they help ensure responsibility and make it easier for future maintenance inspectors to track changes and better document solar panel maintenance.
Going digital with your solar panel maintenance checklist is a great way to improve the workflow for all in your organization. With a digital checklist, you can reduce your paper waste, thus saving you on additional costs. You can also use an online checklist to sign your checklists electronically, pass files wirelessly, and collaborate with your teammates anytime, anywhere. A digital checklist can also help manage your solar panel maintenance costs by helping you track and manage your usage, repairs, and more.
Here is a digital sample solar panel maintenance checklist for example:
Common Solar Panel Issues and Fixes
While solar panels are a reliable and low-maintenance energy solution, they can occasionally encounter issues that affect their performance. Identifying and resolving these problems promptly is essential to ensure your solar panel system operates at its best.
Some of the most common issues a solar panel maintenance checklist and solar panel prevention maintenance checklist can help with are:
- Reduced production and usage of energy harnessed
- Cracks and other physical damages
- Wrong readings on the meters
- Issues with inverters, wirings, and fuses
FAQs about Solar Panel Maintenance Checklists
There are dedicated electricians with different titles and licenses in each country for servicing and maintaining solar panels. They often make their own checklists or download premade ones from the internet.
Although common folk can perform basic maintenance tasks on their solar panels, it is highly recommended that a professional be called for such tasks.
Your solar panels do not need to be maintained daily or weekly, but they should be maintained regularly based on your environment, the kind of solar panel you have, your area’s regulations, and the way you use it. This can mean once or twice every year, once every two years, or every after extreme weather change such as a storm, hurricane, and the like, even if they are working properly.
Most residential-house solar panels can last an average of 25 years before degradation. In some cases, such as those for commercial use, a solar panel can last up to 30 years.
Certain things can cause a solar panel to degrade faster though, which is why regular maintenance is essential. Using a dedicated solar panel maintenance checklist can help with this, as well as track any possible issues with your equipment.
Ensure Effective Solar Panels with a Smart Digital Solution
Performing solar panel maintenance does not have to be a hassle or costly. You can streamline all your operations with SafetyCulture (formerly iAuditor), a mobile-first application that can help provide you with real-time data on your panels, document maintenance tasks and needs, and track your solar panels’ performance regularly.
With SafetyCulture, you can create and manage a flexible solar panel maintenance schedule and plan that you can modify anytime as you see fit with smart, digital, and responsive forms, thus empowering you and your workers to perform your best and enhance the good working conditions of your panels. Report problems, address them, and improve on them from any mobile device, anytime and anywhere, and keep a record of your progress in the cloud for easy reference.
To get started with SafetyCulture, just go to the Public Library and download a solar panel maintenance checklist and edit as you see fit. You can also create your own from scratch for more customizability. All files and reports get automatically stored to the cloud after completion, with each one coming with custom access controls to ensure privacy and security.
SafetyCulture also allows you to do the following:
- Schedule regular solar panel preventive maintenance inspections from the app and be notified of them
- Report issues as they happen and create actions to correct them
- Communicate with teammates and others in your organization through a Heads Up
- Train staff on proper solar panel maintenance with Training modules in-app
- Monitor, manage, and track the movement of equipment and assets
- Automate solar panel performance monitoring with Sensors
- Generate analytical reports to summarize your notes, reports, and actions
- Share your findings by exporting your solar panel maintenance checklists in PDF, Word, Excel, or Weblink formats
Related Solar Panel Maintenance Checklists
Solar Site Survey Checklist
Use this solar site survey checklist to determine if a commercial or residential property is suitable for installing solar panels. Collect information about the site and its roofing, note their observations during assessments, and capture photos and videos of the area, all in one place.
Office Energy Audit
This checklist is used to assess the energy efficiency of a workspace based on equipment, appliances, design, and usage. Certified energy auditors can use this to identify opportunities for energy cost reduction and recommend solutions.
