About Pane Pal Solar

We started as a window and gutter cleaning company. Working on Chicagoland roofs every week, we kept noticing the same thing: solar arrays that nobody had touched since the day they were installed. Pollen film from three springs ago. Droppings baked onto the glass. Nests packed into the gap between the panels and the roof.

Most of those homeowners had no idea. Solar soiling does not announce itself, there is no single day when the array suddenly looks dirty. Output drifts down a few percent a season and the lower number quietly becomes the new normal. Meanwhile the installer had handed the system over at commissioning and moved on, because cleaning is not part of an install contract.

Cleaning panels is not the same job as cleaning windows, though. Get it wrong and you do not leave a streak, you void a warranty on a $20,000 system. So we built a separate division around the one method manufacturers actually accept, rather than treating panels as glass with a better view.

Deionized water and a soft brush. Nothing else.No pressure washing, no chemicals, no abrasives. Pressure washing is faster and cheaper and it is excluded from essentially every panel manufacturer's warranty, so we do not own a pressure washer for this work. Deionized water has had its dissolved minerals stripped out, so it rinses to nothing instead of drying as spots.

From the ground wherever the array allows. We clean with a water-fed pole rather than walking on panels. Walking on an array voids warranties independently of how it is cleaned, and a wet panel on a pitched roof is genuinely dangerous.

A visual inspection at every visit, included. While we are at the array we check for cracked glass, lifted clamps and flashing, chewed wiring, nesting underneath, and shading that has grown in since the install. You get told what we found, whether or not it is work we do. Catching a chewed DC lead is worth more than the cleaning.

Straight pricing, before we start. Residential cleaning starts at $150 for up to 10 panels, then $10-15 per panel. Bird proofing and mesh critter guard run $8-12 per linear foot. Annual contracts start at $300. We quote the whole job rather than billing hourly, and residential bookings take a 30% deposit to confirm the date, with the balance due after the work is done.

We will tell you when not to hire us. If your output dropped suddenly or a single panel reads zero, that is a hardware fault and washing it will not help, call your installer. If your array is ground-mounted and pole-reachable, a $150-$400 deionized water kit will do the job yourself. We would rather say so than sell a cleaning that does not fix the problem.