The honest answer is: it depends on three things — how many panels you have, how dirty they are, and how hard the roof is to reach.
The good news is that those three variables move pricing in predictable ways, so you can sanity-check any quote (ours or anyone else’s) before you sign anything. Here’s how we price drone solar cleans in 2026, and the math that decides whether it actually pays for itself.
Residential: starts at $150
For a typical Coachella Valley home with a 6–20 panel system, we charge a flat $150 for the visit. Above 20 panels, it’s $7.50 per panel.
So:
- 10-panel system → $150
- 24-panel system → $150 + (4 × $7.50) = $180
- 40-panel system → $150 + (20 × $7.50) = $300
- 60-panel system → $150 + (40 × $7.50) = $450
That price includes the pre-flight walk, a deionized water pass with no detergents, before/after photo documentation, and a soft-edge perimeter pass that keeps your tile lines clean. No ladder marks, no foot traffic, no broken tile.
A few things that don’t change the residential price: roof pitch, roof material, the height of the panels, or how dusty they are. Drone access is the same whether you have a single-story comp roof or a two-story Spanish tile. That’s part of why drone pricing tends to be flatter than crew-based pricing — most of the “hard access” surcharges that traditional cleaners apply just don’t exist for us.
Commercial: quoted by site
For warehouse, retail, office, and hospitality arrays — usually 250 to 25,000 panels — we quote per site rather than per panel, because the price is driven by things that aren’t on a panel count:
- Access windows. A grocery store roof we can fly at 5 a.m. before opening is a different job than a 24/7 distribution center where we coordinate around live operations.
- Cadence. Quarterly service contracts price differently than a one-time clean. You’re trading some flexibility for a per-visit discount and a kWh recovery report.
- Add-ons. Thermal scans, soiling reports, COI requirements, and bird-fouling treatment all stack on top of the base clean.
- Volume. At 500+ panels, our per-panel rate drops into volume territory.
Our commercial cleans start from a $200 base plus $4.75 per panel, then adjust for the factors above — so a 300-panel retail roof lands around $1,625 for a one-time clean, with quarterly contracts pricing lower per visit. We’ll always give you a fixed number after a site walk — no surprise surcharges.
Utility-scale: contracted per MW
Ground-mount fields and tracker arrays in the 25,000 to 250,000+ panel range price by megawatt block, not per panel. The economics are different at this scale — what matters is throughput and production scheduling, not the dollar-per-panel number.
A drone fleet runs roughly 2.6× faster than a crew-based wash for a comparable site, which is most of why utility cleaning even pencils. We sequence rows around the production schedule and hand back a per-row soiling and recovery dataset in your format (CSV, SCADA-ready, whatever your O&M team wants).
If you’re modeling this for a project, talk to us — we’ll quote against your site map and production curve.
The math: does it actually pay for itself?
For most Coachella Valley systems, yes — but the why is worth understanding.
A dusty panel produces less power. The exact loss depends on the dust load, the angle of the array, and the time of year, but in the desert it’s normally somewhere in the 8–25% range between cleans. That’s not a marketing number — that’s what the inverter data shows when you compare a pre-clean week to a post-clean week on the same site.
So the rough payback math for a residential system:
- Your system’s annual production (from your monitoring app) × your soiling loss % = kWh you’re losing per year to dust.
- × your blended electricity rate = dollars you’re losing per year.
- Compare that to clean cost × cleans per year.
For a typical 20-panel valley home producing ~10,000 kWh/year, losing 15% to soiling at $0.40/kWh means roughly $600/year in lost production. Two cleans a year at $150 each is $300. Net to you: $300/year, plus a longer panel lifespan because you’re not baking dust onto the glass.
For commercial, the recovery math is much larger in absolute terms — a 1,500-panel warehouse roof losing 12% to soiling can be leaving five figures a year on the table.
What you should be skeptical of
A few things to push back on if you see them in a quote:
- “Free” cleanings bundled with something else. Almost always means the price moved somewhere you can’t see.
- Per-visit prices that vary wildly by roof type. For drone work, roof material shouldn’t change the number — we’re not on your roof.
- Detergent or “panel-safe soap” passes. Most module warranties specifically call out deionized water. Detergent residue can void coverage, attract dust faster, and leave a film visible from the ground. We use DI water only.
- Vague “soiling reports” with no methodology. Ask how the number was measured. If it’s not based on pre/post production data or a reference cell, it’s a guess.
Want a real number for your system?
The fastest way to get a real quote is to send us your address and a photo or system size. For residential, we can usually give you a confirmed price within an hour. For commercial, we’ll schedule a 15-minute site walk and get you a fixed proposal within two business days.