by KaiserJeep » Thu 22 Jun 2017, 16:51:35
Well as the owner of a "conventional" rooftop PV array I will tell you (forgive me baha) that such things are butt-ugly in person, hard to sell your wife on, because she wants the perfect quaint little cottage, not something with a dozen and a half or more gleaming silicon panels. Either the SS roof from Forward Labs or the slate/shingle/tile/glass options from Tesla are far more attractive than add-on panels. I minimized the visual impact on my own house by mounting my panels as far from the street as possible on a rear roof surface.
One practical problem that you have with add-on rooftop PV panels is that they must pierce your rooftop moisture barrier and be anchored to the frame of the flat roof or the trusses of a pitched roof to resist high winds. To begin with, you need to install a roof with a warranteed life of 25+ years, to prevent the necessity of removing/reinstalling the panels when servicing the roof. Having the roof cladding and the PV integrated together neatly avoids having to pierce the roof and to have seperate roofing and solar contractors. (I deal with this, I had 35 years left of a 40-year mineral-clad steel roof warranty when I mounted PV panels on top with 25 year warranty, and probably invalidated my roof warranty on the roof area beneath, as they drove 6-inch hex head bracket mounting screws into my 2x6 vaulted ceiling rafters.)
I DO have a HOA and I did get their permission to install the PV panels. In my letter to them I specified that I was installing the panels on the rear West-facing surface of my roof, where the ridge runs almost exactly North-South. In the SF Bay area, we frequently have what we call "fog" but which is actually a marine layer at the height of the hills around the valley. (The source is either the SF Bay or the Pacific, depending upon whether that day's breezes are onshore or offshore.) But most days the marine layer has been burned off by the sun before noon. Therefore having the PV installed on the West face of my roof (afternoon sun) is better than the East face (morning partial sun).
BTW, you are turned around. In the Northern Hemisphere we try to face the panels S/SE/SW towards the Sun when possible, not N/NE/NW as you indicated. But once again, if your roof has integrated PV, there should be a good appearance match between the PV portion and the conventional materials it mimics which you would use on the remaining roof surfaces.
Let me say that both the Tesla and Forward Labs products are mainly for new home construction, although they could be used in a retrofit/remodel if replacing the roof anyway. Knowing what I now know, I would not actually place PV panels on a roof at all, provided I had the space on the ground for the panels. I would either use fixed panel mounts or active tracking panel arrays, placed where I could perform maintenance without climbing a ladder in my old age. A row of large shrubs or evergreen trees can entirely hide such PV from view.
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Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0