Monitoring & Aftercare

What a solar system actually needs over 20 years

A well-installed solar system needs very little intervention, but 'very little' isn't 'nothing'. Inverters carry 10-year warranties as standard but often keep running for 15. Panels carry 25-year performance warranties. The connections, isolators, DC switches and monitoring hardware in between are where occasional attention pays off.

Remote monitoring gets set up on the day of install. We can see, from our desk, that your system is producing what the weather forecast suggests it should. If a string drops off because of a connector failure or a pigeon nest under the array, we usually see it before you do, sometimes before the next bill makes the numbers obvious.

Annual health checks are optional but worth it: a visual inspection of the array for shading, soiling and bird ingress; a torque check on the DC connections; an inverter firmware review; and a performance report against the baseline we established at commissioning. Panels themselves almost never need cleaning in the UK, natural rainfall does the job, but every 3–4 years a specialist clean can bump generation by a few percent on particularly dusty or tree-adjacent installs.