Wildfires-and-solar-panels: The heavy ash sediment has been known to reduce power production by as much as 30% or more if not washed off.
Source: Wildfires and Solar Panels – Solarponics
I’ve been losing up to 20% of power production every day for the past couple of weeks due to drifting wildland fire smoke. While the smoke is billowing clouds on a few days, or the sky looks visibly smoky, most days are just “slightly hazy”. In the morning and evening, the sun is noticeably orange but we otherwise have blue skies.
Yet with these conditions we have dropped from about 30 kwh to 24-26 kwh power production each day.
I had to hose off the panels last week – there had been a few days with pretty heavy smoke in the air and that seemed to have deposited ash on the panels.
