{"id":6963,"date":"2025-09-11T16:48:31","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T15:48:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/?p=6963"},"modified":"2025-09-11T16:48:32","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T15:48:32","slug":"a-solar-farm-after-6-months-maintenance-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2025\/09\/11\/a-solar-farm-after-6-months-maintenance-report\/","title":{"rendered":"A solar farm after 6 months: Maintenance report"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The report has a huge number of photos, including some cool ones. Here are ones that might be interesting:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Checking for hotspots on some panels with a thermal camera:<\/p>\n\n\n

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Checking the DC cables going from strings to inverters still look ok:<\/p>\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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You also get thermal pictures of all the isolating boxes for the inverters to check there is nothing scary going on inside them:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… A solar farm after 6 months: Maintenance report<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-solar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6963"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6971,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6963\/revisions\/6971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}