What’s going on my man, Spencer claeys here back with another article about how I made $1200 in 3 hours from cleaning some solar panels, doing the gutters, and treating the roof!
This is the script from my most recent Youtube video which you can find HERE so if you prefer to read then you’re in the right place!
We’re going to be getting into making money with this business, doing the actual cleaning, and HOW you can get more jobs just like this for your business so stay tuned for the real money details later in this article.
If you enjoyed this article or video leave a comment below it really helps out the blog and channel I often base my next videos on the awesome suggestions YOU guys give me. I look forward to hearing your thoughts, comments, and questions concerns, whatever you got bring it on!
So this job had 48 panels and some junk in the gutters, and it was kind of an interesting situation. The solar panel company had promised this lady that they would clean the panels the first year but they were so busy that they couldn’t make it out and told her to find someone else to do it and they would just pay for it.
After a couple weeks of calling other companies she finally found my website and even though it was about an hour or so away with the number of panels and such it was definitely going to be worth my while. So I packed up and headed down on a Saturday to knock this out, I brought my girlfriend and my little dog along you might see them wandering around throughout the video.
When the customer first approached me she asked if I did solar panels, and I’ve definitely cleaned a few of them before at some of my customers houses but I always consider myself a “yes man” meaning if someone asks if I can do something I almost always say “Yes” first and figure out the details later.
How Solar panels are cleaned
Come to find out that as a professional solar cleaner you do not actually use any chemicals or need any crazy special tools but the one thing you really need to have is what’s called deionized water. This is just a fancy way of saying filtered water and it’s what many pros use for window cleaning, car detailing and such because if you use like standard hose water from your house no matter where you live, the water is going to have chemicals, minerals, and a bunch of what is called “dissolved solids”.
People rate water on what’s called a TDS scale which is total dissolved solids and if you have a high TDS and use it to clean windows or solar panels, when the water dries you’re gonna see spots from the minerals and stuff in the water.
So to avoid these mineral spots I did some research, watched many videos (thank god for Youtube) and bought the Water de-ionizing filter system you saw at the beginning and a brand new 100 foot hose because you also don’t want to use an old hose that can have buildup of stuff in it.
This new equipment ran me about $500 if you want to check it out there are links below to all of it, If you use those links I think I get like 5 cents or something like that lol. Anyways the setup worked super well and I doubled my money on the first job and now have the equipment to offer this service ALOT more which I definitely plan on doing.
The cleaning process
But yeah let’s get into the process a little bit, if I was going to teach someone to clean solar panels that video could be about 30 seconds long because it is super simple as you can see all we need is a hose with filtered water and a brush that is rated for windows and we’re pretty much good to go.
In this job I used 2 hoses, one with normal water from the old hose and then the brand new hose with filtered water because the filter lasts about 300 gallons or so which isn’t a crazy amount and so to conserve that a bit I rotated with the tap water.
Just definitely make sure that the final rinsing is done with the filtered water only, obviously as then we’re not going to get any spots and it’s gonna dry looking really good.
Side note, when the panels started to dry they looked super weird and almost oily I thought maybe I did something wrong but my customer was saying that’s just how solar panels look when they are clean and aren’t wet. They have more like a matte finish kind of like a computer or a how a tv screen looks so that’s totally normal I still ended up going over the panels multiple times and did several rinses to make sure I didn’t miss any spots.
So yeah just wet the panels down, brush them good to loosen all the dust, pollen and such, and then rinse them back down to get everything off and you’re good to go. I also cleaned the outsides around the edges as they started to get a buildup of algae so keep an eye on that.
*Keep an eye on the gutters too, my customer didn’t actually tell me to do them I just went ahead and cleaned the gutters and the skylights. We even sprayed some wasps nests and took care of anything up on the roof she needed because that’s just the right thing to do and she ended up giving me an extra $350 which was very sweet of her.
But that is pretty much it as far as the actual panel cleaning is concerned, you definitely don’t need any chemicals, just a bit of elbow grease as sometimes the algae or whatnot doesnt want to come off I imagine you could use some sort of window scrubber/scraper to get that off but I just used my sleeve to get it and that worked just fine.
Also, as always be careful up when you’re up on a roof, it’s wet and there’s hoses so rope up and be safe, get good boots and you should be good to go this job went awesome without a hitch.
How to get more jobs for your solar panel/roof cleaning business
And as promised at the beginning I mentioned we would go into getting jobs like this for your business. So initially this customer found my website which brings me in a good amount of customers on autopilot which is nice, I’ll have to do a video on Google My business later.
But as you guys know I don’t like to rely on google I prefer Facebook ads because i’ve just found them to be the cheapest and easiest to get setup plus its more reliable. When you kinda know how much money it cost to get a lead all you have to do is just spend that amount and you can generate as many jobs as you want.
Right after this job I actually ran an ad using some of this exact footage you’re seeing in this video and some quick tips and tricks I used are that the vertical video you know like tik tok style, has been performing the best.
I’ve seen this to be true over the last few months so get some good time-lapses of you doing whatever and run that as an ad with a good offer for your services, I talk more about that in other videos and also in my book if you want to check those out there are links below.
But the first results are in from the last couple days and i’ve gotten 4 messages so far from $20 spent and that’s about $5 per lead. 2 of them are very interested, I’ve already got their addresses I’m going to head over later this week to do their solar panels so that should be about $600 made from $20 of ad spend not too bad at all. Definitely start learning this skill of Facebook ads I highly recommend it it will give you the ability to pretty much print money on demand so checkout the book and some of the courses and free resources below.
The future of a solar panel cleaning business
As far as the business side goes, solar panel cleaning is definitely a huge opportunity that i’m seeing so if you already have any sort of cleaning business this would be a great service to add on. You could even just start this up as your sole service you provide, either way there is a ton of money to be made here.
There’s only more people that are going to be getting solar panels, the demand is only going up and this is a great space to get in on as you saw to start up this business it only took about $500 in equipment and you can make that back really fast.
In this job I ended up charging about $15 per panel to clean I’ve heard people charge anywhere from $12-18 per panel but plus travel time, tax, and the $350 she gave me to do the gutters it ended up being $1200 and the whole job took me about 3 hours so I will take that for a chill Saturday’s work.
But that is pretty much it for this article I hope you guys enjoyed this, like comment and subscribe I really do read all the comments so be sure to let me know your thoughts below, much love Peace
-Spencer