Attention Installers: Please Pay Attention to Design!
Solar home panels are increasingly becoming part of the landscape in communities throughout the U.S. They are cropping up in cities and towns, in the burbs and in downtowns. Some of SolarTown’s best customers are farmers and ranchers. But wherever you live, do not forget to assure that your solar installer pays attention to the design of your array. It is going to be on your roof for decades to come and you don’t want something that is going to look lousy.
We are not installation experts here at SolarTown but we do work with some excellent installers both around the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and throughout the country. You want a quality installation company because these solar modules are going to be on your homes most likely for 25 or 30 years, which is longer than most people live in their homes these days.
What that means is that you should have a long-term outlook on modules. We have made the argument in many of our other blog posts that you should consider not only the price but also the quality of solar panels. A prudent homeowner should not consider modules as commodities. If you are buying a car, you don’t necessarily select the cheapest. Similarly with modules, you want to know about quality and the expected energy output. And you certainly want to take into account how the modules are going to look on your roof.
Beyond the specifications of the solar modules and the other solar energy products that the installer is going to use, you should demand an array that is if not beautiful, at least not ugly. You want to demand of your installer to design a system that will be the pride of the neighborhood. It is one of our pet peeves that some installers seem to have fallen asleep in the clas
s on architectural design. We are not architectural designers ourselves but you would think that at a minimum that a solar company should try to match the lines of the roof. So what if you can’t cram all of the panels on the roof? There are issues of safety and aesthetics that should be considered.
We were attending a kids’ soccer game and saw the solar array shown on the image on the right. It doesn’t look bad as it goes, but it is not readily apparent why this array was designed with two rows in portrait and one in landscape. It looks very odd to have a mix and match orientation and if the reason is to get more modules on the roof, it looks like four rows in landscape would have achieved the same result. I just took a common dimension for one of our best selling modules, the Suniva 265, which is 39 inches by 65 inches. From the crest of the roof to the gutters, the array occupies roughly 169 inches in its current configuration. If you had four rows in landscape, which would be a significant improvement to my eye, it would still fit with 156 inches.
If we are going to overcome objections from some quarters about how solar panels look, solar installers may want to pay more attention to how the arrays on residential roofs look. It would benefit not only the homeowner but the entire industry.