So…my site has actually been live for 11 months now, but there has been a bunch of stuff that needed fixing after initial energization, so the six monthly maintenance thing happened a bit later. If you are asking ‘does it really need maintenance every six months?’ the answer seems to be yes. I pushed back on this, as I thought it was overkill, but have been talked around. if I owned 10 solar farms, I’d totally let one have maintenance every year or 18 months to see if it was worth it, but with a single asset I likely shouldn’t risk it.
Anyway, I just got the first report. Its VERY long and detailed. Its a 90MB PDF file, if that helps contextualize it. Here are some highlights:
Firstly, google have updated their data and there is now a proper google maps image! They add little points on the image to tell me where stuff was spotted that might need fixing, or keeping an eye on:
In general the summary of the report is this: “The inspection of the site and inverters, and testing of the DC circuits, found generally positive results, although some minor issues were identified – details in the report.” – Which is very good news because frankly so much stuff stressed me out as it was built I really could do with a few long sustained periods of just simple revenue generation from it. I think I will be at least 68 years old before it breaks even, but as long as it eventually does, I’ll be ok with that. This was not a money making scheme for me.
The report has a huge number of photos, including some cool ones. Here are ones that might be interesting:
Checking for hotspots on some panels with a thermal camera:
Checking the DC cables going from strings to inverters still look ok:
You get before-and-after pictures showing that the fans on the inverters have been cleaned. I visited one hot day when the fans were really going for it. I could hear them from 30 feet away. Each inverter is 80-100kw output, so the fans are working pretty hard sometimes. I’m not sure these really need cleaning twice a year, but we have only had one winter so far. Maybe super stormy and muddy weather will be way worse.
There are pages and pages of testing data like this table, which makes sense if you are an electrician, but from my POV its just nice to have a historic benchmark for this stuff so if anything fails we can look back and see what went on:
You also get thermal pictures of all the isolating boxes for the inverters to check there is nothing scary going on inside them:
They also get taken apart and cleaned. I think that might be a bit overkill too. Its tricky. On the one hand, what do I know? on the other hand people who service stuff always have misaligned incentives with regards to what is ‘essential’. If I had a hundred million pounds, I’d buy my own solar farm installation and maintenance company and then I’d know…
There is a ton of other stuff but I will spare you thirty pages of before-and after pictures of plastic boxes that got cleaned, or the many pictures of slight patches of rust on the edges of some supporting frame struts. I guess its good evidence that it was done thoroughly, with a lot of time spent looking for problems. Rather annoying an inverter was left OFF for half a day by error during all this, which happened to be a fairly poor generation day anyway, but that was annoying…
In any case I’ve decided to stick with the same company for the medium term carrying out these checks. At some point we will have a full years of proper generation and I can look at stats and muse as to how well or badly things are doing. I *think* its performing about as expected, which is good enough for me. I just hope the price I can sell the power for does not collapse!