With over 1 million residential solar installations in the UK pigeons are an increasing problem.
With most solar panel installations retrofit on-roof panels, the gap underneath the panels has proven to be a lovely warm sheltered area for birds, predominantly pigeons, to nest underneath. This then leads to the build up of nests, guano build up and dead bird carcasses and then these can attract rodents. With all this activity under the panels it can often lead to damaged cables which means lost production and lost income.
Up until recently the only solution to this was to fit mesh around the solar panels. Even fitted well it rarely makes PV systems look any better, and if sub-standard mesh is used it can make them look terrible.
Another major problem affecting most PV systems is that they are ugly. The vast majority are silver framed, blue panels, and being on-roof they then have a gap underneath showing the rail, clamps, cable, gap and often over time the rain water run-off which leads to an unpleasant algae build up on the bottom edge of the panels.
Currently most new PV systems are often black panels, often with black rail, which mitigates the problem, but when the UK solar industry was taking off black panels were at an expensive premium.
We have designed SolaSkirt to address both of these problems. This came about because we saw that there is a market for a system that not only keeps out pigeons and other rodents, but also would help to improve the look of PV systems, giving them a sleek finish and giving silver framed panels a sleek black finish.
And so, after much trial and error we developed SolaSkirt. Our black trim is quickly and easily fitted around solar panel systems, closing up the gap and giving the systems a sleek, black edged, finish. It improves the look of the system, covers up rain water run-off, rail and cable, and keeps out the critters, meaning happier customers.
The image above shows 2 PV system arrays, one with SolaSkirt and one without.
If you are interested in SolaSkirt for your PV system, send us an email to [email protected]
The system below shows a solar panel system before and after the installation of SolaSkirt.