You service a boiler every year without thinking about it. A solar system is a generator wired into your house that nobody looks at for a decade, and the usual way people find out something is wrong is a bill that has quietly gone back up.
Servicing is priced per visit on the size and type of system, and monitoring is a standing arrangement rather than a one-off. We will quote both after we know what you have, which usually takes one phone call and a couple of photographs of the inverter and the array.
The important part: we will take on systems installed by somebody else, including installers who have since gone out of business. That is a large part of what we do. You do not need to have bought the system from us to get it looked after.
Panels, mounting, clamps and cable runs checked for movement, wear, shading that has grown in since installation, and anything a winter has loosened.
Fault and event logs read off, cooling and connections checked, firmware looked at. Inverters are the part most likely to fail and the part most likely to be silently derating.
Where there is storage, we check state of health, cycle count, ventilation and terminals against what the manufacturer expects at that age.
We measure what the system is producing and compare it against what it should be producing for that array on that day, which is how underperformance gets found.
Anything we can put right on the visit, we do. Anything larger gets written up with what it will cost and what it is costing you to leave it.
Optional, and the part most people get the most from. We watch output remotely and pick up the phone when something drops off, instead of you finding out at the end of the quarter.
Yes. It makes no difference to us who fitted it, and it is a good part of our work. If the original installer has gone under, we can usually still get at the monitoring and the warranty position for you.
Once a year is sensible for most systems, the same as a boiler. Larger commercial and agricultural arrays with more panels and more inverters are worth looking at more often, simply because there is more to go wrong and more money riding on it.
Often you do not, and that is the problem. A single failed string or a derating inverter can take a quarter off your output without stopping anything or showing an error on the display. Comparing measured output against expected output is the only reliable way to catch it.
In most cases British weather does a reasonable job. Panels under trees, near a farm track or on a shallow pitch are the exceptions, and heavy soiling does measurably cut output. We will tell you if yours actually need it rather than selling you a clean as a matter of course.
That is exactly the sort of job we take. Inverter faults, string failures, isolator and DC problems, monitoring that has dropped off the network. Ring us with what the display is showing and we will tell you what we think before we come out.
