Ash Covering your Solar Panels is costing you a lot of Extra PGE

10/18/2020 (Permalink)

Ash covered solar panels don't produce electricity well, costing you more money

ASH had covered my Solar Panels and my True Up was going through the roof. Every month I watch my PG&E bill and particularly my True Up as I have solar on my house. Usually my PGE Bill is a few dollars or a negative amount but last month, it was $206. When I looked at my True Up it was over $400 a month for the last two months, it more than doubled over the past 3 months. The True Up is something that a lot of people don't watch. This is the amount of electricity you ACTUALLY use each month. In theory, you use less in the winter and more in the summer. This gets averaged out and at the end of your True Up year, you have a negative amount or an amount owed. I usually trend to have a True Up of about $1000 on top of my Solar cost and Monthly PGE cost. But, this past month I saw that my True UP was almost $1900 year to date. More than DOUBLED my average. I started looking into why my costs were going up so fast, and yes it is hotter and our air conditioning is running more, BUT I found out that the ASH from the wildfires has not only coated everything in my world, but had covered my solar panels and was reducing the amount they were producing. I was virtually paying for solar yet not producing any power and using PGE for my electricity. I contacted my Solar company and they said to get the production back up I needed to simply rinse them with water to get the ash off. They stated the panels are designed to clean simply with water. They said DO NOT scrub them, use soap and water, or pressure wash, just simply rinse them off. This made a huge impact and my production is back up to where it should be. As I look around my neighborhood I see most of the panels are white, and covered with ash. Are yours this way and are you being impacted by this ? Are you losing the advantage of your solar panels? Hopefully you will see this and learn what I learned. Hopefully this will help to stop the bleeding as we are paying for solar and we are paying more for PGE that we are losing in our production. Have you looked at your PGE bill and your NEM charges? Did you know you can call your Solar company and ask for a production report to see how much you may be losing? The fix is simple and necessary, simply rinse your panels to clean them. The rain will fix this also, but in the meanwhile we are paying for it in increased PGE costs. Hope this post finds you well and feel free to share your experiences.