How to Reduce the Pain of your Solar Panels being Stolen

Insider tips to buying Solar Panels
What to do if you intend to ‘expand’ later
Why we cannot ‘just add another panel’ to an installation
Talk to your insurance company before doing any solar installation

Solar panels are a commodity that can be stolen – often clients fail to see any missing and only discover their loss after interrogating their system as to why the expected yield is so low.

First let’s look at a few reasons why you cannot just replace a stolen solar panel with just any solar panel:

Most inverters are MPPT. MPPT or Maximum Power Point Tracking is an algorithm included in charge controllers used for extracting maximum available power from PV modules under certain conditions.

Most inverters for domestic use have two MPPT’s and the solar panels will be connected in two strings to the inverter.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems generate electricity via the photovoltaic effect – whenever sunlight knocks electrons loose in the silicon materials that make up solar PV cells. It follows then that any shading will reduce the output of any solar panel. In fact in his book, Renewable Energy and Efficient Electric Power Systems, Stanford University’s Gil Masters demonstrates how shading just one out of 36 cells in a small solar module can reduce total power output by as much as 75%.

The shading on a single solar panel is the “weakest link,” reducing all the remaining cells’ power availability. By the same token if you have 6 Solar Panels in a string and one is stolen then that “weakest link” will pull down the entire strings production – a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link.

Electricity production from solar panels degrade by around 1% per year.

That follows then that when purchasing Solar Panels you have to be very cogniscant of:

Make sure that all solar panels are of the same make, type and size
Make sure that all solar panels are manufactured at the same time
Make sure that you have NO shading on any part of the strings

Any deviation from the above will lead to a compromise of production which, over many years, will cost you lots of money in failed production.

If one or more of your Solar Panels is stolen then you need to make sure that your system is covered along with the Solar Panels.

Insurance companies differ in how they will approach a claim for stolen solar panel/s with some saying that if they cannot replace with the same then they will replace ALL, whilst others say that they will replace with the closest to the original. What these companies have not factored in is the degradation of 1% per year and still need to take into consideration that in the space of 10 years generally available solar panel sizes have increased from 180 watts to 550 watts.

WHAT TO DO IN CASE YOUR SOLAR PANELS ARE STOLEN?

“When purchasing your system buy another 3 or 4 solar panels – of the same type, wattage and date of manufacture of those installed – to keep in storage. And, if the dreaded thieves make off with a few of your panels then you can at least come to an arrangement with your insurance company to ‘sell’ your spares to them,” says Straton Solar.