Going green has been one of the biggest trends in the last 20 years.
Millions of people are getting solar panels on their roofs, Teslas, tax credits and like any rush, there is a way to capitalize on it.
Starting a solar panel cleaning business is a fantastic idea because people who have them are the types of people who have money.
This is always a great sign for any business.
You want people who give a shit and also have the money to do something about it.
So if you live in an area that has a lot of sun and more importantly people who have solar panels this is something you’re gonna want to check out.
Even for people like me who live in Seattle, this isn’t the best business to start at first but to date, we still have cleaned thousands of dollars worth and it’s on the rise.
For people in California, Arizona, Nevada, and so on this is a must add to your current exterior cleaning business.
It’s the perfect add-on whether you do windows, gutters, roof cleaning, or anything of the sort. Most people aren’t gonna want to bother with getting up on the roof, having the proper tools, and in general, they have enough money not to worry about doing that sort of stuff themselves.
Much like gutters solar panels generally should be cleaned about once a year. There is some debate to this. I’ve seen studies that say cleaning your panels doesn’t really do much to improve efficiency but even if that’s true it doesn’t matter, I equate it to getting your car washed regularly.
Yeah, cleaning your car won’t make it run any better but you don’t want it covered with dirt or pigeon shit, especially if you live in a nice house in a nice area.
People buy and get stuff done to improve their status. This is a fundamental reason behind most businesses that sell products or services.
So whether or not it improves efficiency isn’t really relevant. People want their panels to look good and be as efficient as possible and are gonna get them cleaned anyway so here’s how to do it.
First, solar panels should be cleaned with filtered water. If your water TDS (total dissolved solids) is low you can get away without it but if you’re somewhere with shitty water like Orange County in California you should get some sort of filtration system.
I bought the basic one off Amazon for like $400 bucks (I show it in the video attached to this article) nothing fancy but it gets the job done.
There are better ones like the deionized water filtration systems but some of those can set you back a few thousand bucks. I would at least get something simple, start offering the service and if it pops off then upgrade.
Cleaning the panels is easy as shit. You simply get any basic window cleaning brush on a pole or a water-fed pole brush and pretend like you’re washing a car just without soap.
Soap isn’t the best for panels as it can leave that residue on the panels so best to avoid that and just use plain old water.
Some additional tips would be to order a cleaning pole at least 12+ feet long and get the widest brush head you can.
Anyway as mentioned it’s pretty easy overall, just rinse, brush, and rinse again with the clean water (you can do the first rinse with non-filtered water so you’re not wasting too much filtered).
Non-filtered water can leave calcium spots which isn’t what we want but you don’t need to use filtered water the entire time because it does cost a few bucks.
The cleaning part being the easiest part let’s move on to getting jobs.
For this there are really only two main ways in the beginning.
Door knocking and Facebook ads.
Door knocking can be good because you can directly see if people have solar panels or not. If they do and they’re dirty definitely go see if you can land them as a customer.
I’ll write a door to door basics article another time but just know I landed my third door I ever knocked, nervous and no experience. There are scripts and ways to do it better but at the end of the day, its just a numbers game.
Facebook ads are my favorite way to get customers.
Here we can target different audiences we think will be more likely to have solar panels. In one of my campaigns I targeted people who were interested in Tesla and another audience of people interested in Solar energy.
Worked pretty well!
On Facebook, the biggest thing is to have a great offer that people can see and immediately internalize.
In that same campaign, I had a $275 FULL solar panel clean special and used that as a flat rate. From here I upsold several of the customers into roof and gutter cleans, some of whom have continued to call me back over a year later!
This added thousands of dollars of extra business.
So don’t be afraid of the low ticket offer for Facebook.
Get something out there, put it in front of people’s eyeballs and start making some sales.
Solar panel cleaning is easily one of the next biggest businesses that people will be calling about in the future so its good to get in on this now so that you can start taking over your market while many of your competitors are sleeping on it.
Google SEO will be more important moving forward so start putting it on your website that you do it. Make sure to add popular keywords like “solar panel cleaning las vegas” so that people looking to get it done will see your website.
SEO is also a topic for another day but start thinking about adding this extremely profitable service to your business and get in while its still early.
Do a great job cleaning, upsell every job, and become very good at marketing your own business.
That’s enough to get you started. If you want to learn more about Facebook ads or door knocking I have tons more videos on my Youtube so go check those out or if you want help from me personally, join my Skool community while its still at this price…
Talk soon my friend, go get that money!
-Spencer Claeys