July 27, 2026
Dirty panels, spicy comments
Should you wash your solar panels?
Turns out a scrub helps a bit, but the comments are screaming about shocks, ladders, and life choices
TLDR: Washing visibly dusty solar panels gave a small but real boost, around 2% to 5%, so it may be worth doing if they’re easy to reach. But commenters were far more fired up about the author getting a "tingle," with many warning that safety matters more than squeezing out a little extra power.
A homeowner with a dusty little solar setup did the most relatable experiment possible: wash some panels, stare at the numbers, and hope for glory. The result? A modest 2% to 5% boost, worth roughly £60 to £150 a year at first, which is useful but not exactly "quit your job" money. But the actual spectacle wasn’t the soap bucket science — it was the comments section instantly turning into a mix of safety lecture, money rant, and light roast.
The biggest gasp came from the author casually mentioning a mysterious "tingle" while cleaning the panels, then saying ChatGPT told him it was probably fine. Readers were not calm. One commenter basically hit the panic button, saying it was "worrying" that artificial intelligence got consulted before checking whether the system was properly grounded. Another camp was more practical and very dad-coded: sure, washing may help, but for roof panels the real danger is not dirt — it’s you falling off a ladder. Meanwhile, some armchair optimizers wondered if the real galaxy-brain move is to automate the cleaning with water sprays, while others got distracted by the line about not cleaning before selling a house, arguing that of course you clean them so buyers think everything looks loved.
And then there’s the money drama: upgrading old-but-working panels sounds smart until weird payment rules mean newer power could earn far less. So yes, a wash might pay off — but the community’s real verdict was: please survive the cleaning first.
Key Points
- •The author estimates that cleaning the solar panels improved power output by about 2% to 5%.
- •The test used 16 panels split into two banks of eight, with inverter-reported output from each bank compared as a ratio.
- •The article says raw power output was avoided as the main metric because weather and sun angle would confound results.
- •The results showed a stable pre-wash ratio, an increase as more panels were cleaned, and then an unexplained drop after all panels were washed.
- •The solar system is described as about 15 years old and producing 3.7 kW peak output from 16 panels.