Facility
Fracsun’s manufacturing facility is located in San Luis Obispo on the Central Coast of California. The 3500 sq-ft facility includes the primary headquarters for Fracsun offices as well, allowing our team to carefully control the entire manufacturing process, from procurement to production to fulfillment.
Our San Luis Obispo facility has a production capacity of over 100 soiling sensors per month. ARES soiling sensors, Wash Extension (our solar powered automated pumping system), and universal mounting kits are all assembled in the facility. Purposefully designed stations in the facility are dedicated to building each individual product.
The facility is also a working lab. Bryan and Catlin can often be spotted tinkering with new products, testing new features, building customized solutions for customers, and helping the production team finish work orders.
This short video showcases just a few manufacturing processes in Fracsun’s production line.
Solar simulator
Fracsun’s manufacturing facility also houses a 1600W full spectrum solar simulator. Solar simulators use a light source that replicates natural sunlight at the surface of the Earth and includes ultraviolet, visible and infrared energy bands. Our simulator produces this unique light with a high intensity xenon arc lamp with an output that is focused using carefully calibrated mirrors and lenses.
Our manufacturing team uses the solar simulator to test and characterize the photovoltaic (PV) based reference cells that are used in the ARES soiling sensor. After testing is complete, these reference cells will later be matched in pairs before installing into the ARES enclosure. This entire process is a very important and critical step to producing a quality PV-based soiling sensor.
Rooftop testing
While not nearly as exciting as the solar simulator room, our solar manufacturing facility wouldn’t be complete without a roof for testing new products. In fact, you can view LIVE soiling data from the ARES sensor installed on our roof. Fill out this form and immediately receive the login credentials to the Fracsun Portal to start viewing the data.