Solar panel anti-static coatings

Has nobody really ever heard of this stuff? I guess it seems pretty new but it seems almost universally useful for anyone who owns or makes their own arrays, especially for those of us that live in super-dry climates where there is less rain to wash away grime and buildup.

your money, their pocket. Warranty: out the window.

Panels are made from tempered glass, and are pretty tough. No coating will keep dust from settling on the panel, and no panel mfg will honor warranty if the panel has been treated with anything. Even rain-x (which I love and use on my cars) declines to state if it's safe to spray a $5 product onto a $350 PV panel.

Depending on the type of anti reflection coating used by the panel manufacturer on panel glass (if any), such an after market coating may interfere with any anti reflection properties and decrease performance. I doubt, although I don't know for sure, that such after market products actually do much of anything to improve performance.

I think the idea is that it stops stuff like bird poop from sticking and just turns to dust as it dries, and dust just blows away with the wind.

I thought about Rainex too (I live in a really dusty/sandy area) but it would need to be reapplied constantly; the Drywired Perma Clean Solar has a 10 year warranty, which is pretty sweet. Rainex is cool but permanent Rainex would be awesome.

I guess it would void most warranties unless it was a "recommended product" or something. Maybe they do what window tint companies do and take over the warranty? I don't see anything about it on the website.

Have you ever actually used anything like this or are you just assuming it's a scam? I read somewhere that dirt can decrease efficiency by up to 25% so maybe it's worth it? How would manufacturers even know if something had been applied? Looks like all of these are pretty much invisible...couldn't you just remove it if you wanted to claim warranty?

I dunno, I've read in a few places that dirt/dust/grime/pollution can mask the arrays and drop performance by as much as 20-30%:







I live in a pretty dry, grimey area so I feel like it might be worth a try, but I'm curious if anyone else has already tried it before I go voiding my warranty...I might try it anyways but I'd like to hear some genuine testimonials first if possible.

J.P.M. and a couple of others have been monitoring production under varying degrees of clean - they are not just blowing smoke.

I contacted Rain-X some time back asking about this due to discussions here - they said they couldn't comment as no testing had been done. For them it is a mini market - not worth bothering with.

Here's another really interesting one.




I find it odd that this one claims to be "hydrophobic," and the Drywired coating is "hydrophilic." I understand the difference, but I wonder if one would be more effective than the other. Anyone know more about this stuff?

MIT is saying that the UAE loses as much as 40% to dust/sand; if this "anti-static" coating means that sand and dust and all that other crap gets whisked away with the wind, maybe manufacturers will start just putting it on from the get-go.

Ever been there? Dust in the Gulf can be heavy at times.

For sure, and in the southwest US too. In fact, most of the really high-potential solar markets are very dry climates:

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It's going to be a huge market before long, though...I hope more research comes out. I've been on a bit of a kick researching nanotechnology and I just think it sounds really interesting. I'm looking at a build and I'm trying to do everything possible to make it as simple and hassle-free as possible, so I was hoping this would keep me from having to climb up on top of my roof once a month...

Most people just clean them from ground level.

It is a shame that the internet has let anyone write about anything - if there were an editor involved maybe 90% of green reporting would never be seen as it isn't real. Some troll the university research lab web sites and print whatever they find - not realizing that maybe 1% of it make it to the market in 10 years.

What do you clean it with? Some kind of long pole?

To Russ' comment, and as sort of an update: After 9 months or so I'm still collecting data. The biggest challenge at this time as I see it is how to present the data in a forum format such as this.

Keeping in mind that panel fouling is probably extremely site specific:

Some REAL prelim. thoughts for my efforts and array so far:

- Panel fouling without rain seems to increase somewhat linearly and decreases performance by something like 1% per week without rain.

- Rain seems to restore something like about half of the fouling induced performance reduction. That is, what was, say an 8% performance reduction after 8 weeks of no rain gets reduced to something like 4% or so after a some rain. As might be expected, this seems somewhat dependent on rainfall amount but not linearly. .66" rain improves performance more than .10" rain, but not as much as the ratio of rainfall amounts might lead one to suspect. After some rain, fouling seems to go back to or continue the 1% per week rate of increase. Sketchy like all the rest, partly because it hasn't rain much.

- Array average temps taken as the average of the panel temps. for my array seem to agree fairly well with the array temp. algorithm SAM uses. However, the measured individual panel temps, which are something of an estimate, but have the benefit of a consistent measurement method for all panels, vary from one panel to the next as f(wind vel., gustiness, direction, individ. panel quirks...) by about 3 to 5 deg. C. or so. Again, as might be expected, panel temps on the upwind (leading edges) of the array are cooler than those downwind.

- I'm still of a mind that the fouling rate will become asymptotic at some point, but as dry as it's been, there has not been a long enough rain free period around here to get the panel measure of est. fouling above 8% or so. I can't say that it will trend asymptotic at this time, and so that remains a conjecture for now.

- The adventure continues. Looks like for now, for my array only, washing it after 6 weeks of no rain may help hold the performance degradation to an average of something like 3% or so, +/- a lot.

- I intend to continue monitoring as clear days allow. After the recent rain(s), I'll measure performance as clear days and by crammed social calendar allow for another couple of weeks, and then wash the array for the 1st time since 06/22/14, hopefully sometime around the winter solstice, and after that measure again the first clear day after washing.

Still don't know how best to present data and results, if at all. Perhaps an informal abstract type format as above might be best.

Film at 11. Bulletins when they break.

Well I don't think it's really that far off in terms of usefulness...the reason I got so interested in nanotechnology is because a friend of mine got an aftermarket "nanocoating" on his phone from Drywired, the first company I linked to in OP (we read the warranty and surprisingly nothing in the warranty stated that this would void it) and now it's water resistant, like the Galaxy and Sony phones with plugs, but his doesn't have any of that; we literally poured water right onto the logic board and it doesn't hurt it one bit, and he can put it underwater in the tub or a little dish and it works just fine. The touchscreen doesn't work underwater (according to the guy from Drywired, touchscreens work by sensing heat and water has a really high specific heat so it absorbs the heat and effectively makes your finger cold enough that the screen doesn't respond) but he just dries it off and everything is fine.

So I know this stuff isn't all a scam, there's probably something to it...I just haven't seen the solar stuff in action yet. But between the number of similar products I'm finding on Google, the stats I'm finding on production, and how well that company's stuff for the phone worked, I wonder if they are on to something.