Panels not performing?
We’ll find out why

Yes, and it is one of the most common reasons people call us. A great many solar firms from the last fifteen years no longer exist, which leaves working installations with nobody to look after them.

Worth knowing: any workmanship guarantee from the original installer usually disappears with the company, but manufacturer warranties on the panels, inverter or battery are between you and the manufacturer and often still stand. We’ll check what’s still in force before quoting to replace anything.

There’s no legal requirement, and panels themselves need very little. In practice a check every few years is sensible for a domestic system, and annually for anything commercial where the value at stake is higher.

The parts worth keeping an eye on are the inverter, the DC isolators, the connections and the monitoring — not the panels.

Often less than people are told. On a normal pitched roof, rain does most of the work and the gain from cleaning can be small.

It’s worth doing where there’s a real cause: a shallow pitch that doesn’t self-clean, overhanging trees, heavy bird traffic, agricultural or industrial dust. We’ll tell you honestly whether cleaning your roof would change the numbers or just the appearance.

A gradual decline is usually shading that has grown, soiling, or a failing component such as an optimiser. A sudden drop is more often a string that has gone down, a failed isolator or an inverter fault.

Some apparent drops turn out to be nothing at all — a poor year for sunshine, or monitoring reporting incorrectly. Part of the visit is establishing whether there’s genuinely a fault.

Yes. The inverter is the component most likely to need replacing during a system’s life, typically somewhere between ten and fifteen years in.

We don’t always have to use the same brand, which matters when the original manufacturer no longer trades. A replacement needs commissioning correctly and, depending on the system, notifying to your network operator — both of which we handle.

Yes. We work on storage and charge points fitted by other companies, including systems where the battery and the solar were installed by different firms and have never talked to each other properly.

It depends entirely on the job. A lot of fault finding happens at the inverter and consumer unit with no roof access at all.

If we do need to get onto the roof, it has to be done with proper access equipment — that might be a tower rather than full scaffolding for a small job. We’ll tell you what’s needed and what it costs as part of the findings, not as a surprise afterwards.

For commercial systems, yes — scheduled servicing with a report each visit is usually worth having where the generation is material to the business.

For domestic systems most people are better served by a check every few years rather than an annual contract, and we’d rather say so than sell you something you don’t need.