Dealing With Potential Animal Damages On Your Solar Panels
Having a fully-functional set of solar panels gives you a huge electrical bill boon. You can offset about 30-50% of your energy consumption with an excellent solar panel array. However, your investment might go down the gutter (literally) if animals damage and cause it to malfunction years before the end of its lifespan. Here are three ways animals can damage your solar panels.
Scratches
Birds and squirrels love populating residential roofs because of their warmth. Many animals create their habitats near their eating and waste-dropping areas. Solar panel warmth combined with asphalt shingle or roofing material moisture makes your roofs the perfect habitat. Birds and squirrels can cause scratches on sensitive photovoltaic cells, causing a massive performance reduction.
Wire and Electrical Circuit Damage
Apart from scratching the panels, small animals can chew or peck against your solar panel's electrical wires and circuits. The networks of your professional Littleton, CO solar panel installation teams for your solar panels will go to waste.
Panel Corrosion
Animal droppings are highly acidic. Plus, they're known to deposit waste in the same areas that possess its scent. Consistent droppings will cause rapid panel corrosion. Even the best stainless steel frames can suffer from huge damage if you leave this unattended.
Bird B Gone has an excellent post about removing birds and pest animals from your solar panels. Read more about them here.
Pests and Your Solar Investment
Amidst all this incredible growth and technological advancement, one very unsophisticated yet troublesome problem continues to plague these ultra-modern systems: critters. Pigeons, squirrels, and other birds and pests can cause significant damage to high-tech solar panel arrays.
Solar panels are typically installed with space between the panels and the roof to allow room for necessary wiring and to provide ventilation so that heat doesn’t build up and affect the function of the panels.
Small animals love the safety and shelter this small space provides from wind, rain, and the hot sun, but allowing critters unrestricted access to this safe space is not a good idea. Consider the following:
Birds love to build their nests underneath solar arrays. A mess made up of bird droppings, nesting materials, and even broken eggs and dead chicks collects beneath the panels, reducing air flow and causing heat to build up around the panels.
This bird mess can eventually flow into your gutters and down the side of your home or building, causing gutter blockages and an unsightly mess. A significant infestation of birds under your panels can block your gutters in less than a week; bird messes happen fast.
More birds under the panels means more birds on the panels. Bird droppings on the surface of your solar panels reduce their effectiveness and looks terrible. Bird droppings that have baked in the sun on your panels are also extremely difficult to remove and can leave permanent damage behind.
Squirrels and even some birds chew on the exposed wiring underneath the panels. The broken electrical connections caused by chewed wires will cause your system to run inefficiently, potentially costing you thousands of dollars in unnecessary energy costs, not to mention the cost of repairing the damaged wires.
Damaged wiring mixed with nesting materials, leaves, and other debris poses a significant fire hazard.
Families of nesting birds on your roof under your solar panels will wake you up every morning between 3 and 4am. Birds on your roof are a noisy nuisance.
It’s not just animals that can cause problems in this space; leaves, twigs, and other debris can also collect under your solar panels, trapping heat, washing into gutters, and posing a fire hazard. (Continued)
If you have yet to find a reliable solar panel installation team, Roper Roofing has got your back. Contact us today to learn more about everything that we can do for you.
