What Maintenance Does Commercial Solar Need?

2 min read
Maintenance & Support
Gunnersbury Lane Solar Install Drone Mid Stage

TL;DR

Remarkably little for a 25 year asset. No moving parts means the routine is remote monitoring, an annual inspection, cleaning when soiling justifies it, and fault response when the monitoring flags something. Budget £10 to £20 per kWp per year for a proper O&M package, and plan for one inverter replacement around year 10 to 15. The panels themselves carry 25 to 30 year performance warranties.

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What an O&M Package Covers

Monitoring does the daily work, watching every string’s output against expected yield and flagging underperformance before it costs a season. The annual visit covers the physical side: modules, fixings, cabling, isolators and switchgear inspected, connections tested, and the report your insurer and asset register want.

Cleaning is site specific rather than scheduled dogma. Rain keeps most pitched commercial arrays respectable; flat roofs near dust, birds or industrial fallout earn a periodic clean because soiling shows up directly in the generation data. We clean when the numbers say so, not by calendar.

The One Big Ticket Item

Inverters work hard and live shorter lives than panels, ten to fifteen years is the honest planning window, and a 25 year financial model should include one replacement. It is a known, budgetable event, not a surprise, and monitoring usually telegraphs an inverter’s decline long before failure.

Panels degrade at roughly half a percent a year, which the performance warranty guarantees, typically promising 80 to 87 percent of original output at year 25. Warranty claims are rare and we handle them when they happen.

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Who Should Hold the Contract

The installer who built the system, for the same reason the architect keeps the drawings. We maintain what we install under the same O&M service our EV charging clients use, one number, monitored around the clock, annual reports in plain English. Under a PPA the funder carries all of this instead, which is part of what the PPA rate buys.

Commercial Solar installation by EV-ON
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Our O&M service covers monitoring, inspections, cleaning decisions and fault response, with reports written for owners. Want a System That Stays Watched?

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