I’m dumb and poor and if someone wants me to work on a beautiful island I might charge half price.
Sounds like a business opportunity.
A public shoutout to @microbet.
The background is that my brother in law referred a solar company to us. My wife and her brother are twins and super close so anything he recommends she’ll almost always follow through on.
So we got the sales pitch. We asked a couple of questions, and the sales person was gregarious, persuasive, etc. The only time he got tripped up was when I said that I needed to run the proposal by a friend, but he did the normal resolve concerns steps and we signed an initial agreement.
Before I heard back from microbet I had asked my wife about the proposal and she said she didn’t feel super enthusiastic about it. The payback period was really long, close to break even and the the loan was not small.
Microbet emailed back raising some flags about the lender’s quality, the cost of the installation, and some shady notes on the agreement, like adding in unnecessary parts.
We called up the lender and canceled the loan. We attempted to call the installer but the phone number of the agreements was out of order. We looked them up and tried calling them and got no one on the three days we called. We left messages and sent a certified letter to the postal address to cancel the project. We haven’t heard back from them but the certified letter was signed for.
Thanks microbet for helping out!
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Thanks and you’re very welcome.
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@microbet they’re getting very close to something I’d be willing to put on my own house. Heck, give me a couple years of success in the field with this and I’d probably accept it as is.
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They’ve been doing shingles like that for the whole time I’ve been in the industry…since 2007. I took a solar class at the time and a sales rep from Eagle Roofing came in with their solar shingle. As part of the demo the dude jumped on the panel/shingle. I still know that guy. He sells regular panels now.
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What has been preventing widespread adoption? From a building performance standpoint this is so much better than bolting a rack through your roof.
Are you worried about leaks? because the mounts are self-flashed and essentially don’t leak.
Mostly it’s price. The solar shingles and tiles always have cost more and people always decided to not get them. Tesla is now making some, not much but some, headway I think. This is because Tesla doesn’t give a shit about losing money. (Don’t take their underpricing as sufficient reason to use them. They are a shitty solar company. Won’t take you long to find horror stories if you look.)
There was also a set back to these products because of code or listing reasons. I’m not sure exactly what it was, but I think someone decided the electrical connections, which had been under the shingle, were not ok under shingles (too inaccessible). This system seems to have put them under some removable thing. That’s probably a bad idea for everything except satisfying code.
There may have been some problem finding people who wanted to install these and do both a whole roof and electrical stuff. I would have done it though (I have general and electrical licenses) and I offered these things for a while and no one wanted them because of price. (Some of the products have been amorphous solar instead of crystalline and that’s significantly inferior. I never offered those. I don’t know which kind this one is.)
Maybe this will be the product that breaks through, but I wouldn’t jump to buy their stock. And this type of product will almost certainly be somewhat common in tract home construction before it’s much of a thing in putting on existing homes. You’ve got to need a roof at the same time you want solar and you’ve got to have someone around who is willing to do both.
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My concerns have always been the complications of having two separate systems on your roof doing two separate things, and how doing anything with one of them is going to impact and/or be affected by the other. I know all the arguments why this shouldn’t be a concern and I’m not going to try to talk anybody else out of getting a conventional system. It’s just not something I want to deal with on my own house.
GAF is one of (maybe the) largest roofing suppliers in N. America and they’ve been around forever. I think I have more faith in an established company pulling this off than some idealistic startup. They’re claiming the cost of this new line is equivalent to a new roof + a new rack solar system.
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It’s also better for the solar to have air flow underneath.
I’m watching a little more of that video (I wanted to look at the electrical connections more) and yeah, most installers do a pretty bad job of hitting rafters. I’ve never seen the racking rip out, and they get 100mph winds in the canyons outside LA, but yeah, a lot of installers are lazy and bad at this. I’ve seen from the attics where someone has missed rafters like 30% of the time. Neither I, nor the guy I still work with, do this. We find the center.
It does look like they solved the electrical connection code problem by putting the wires on top of the panels instead of underneath. I’d be a little concerned about how well those covered hold up.
Another code issue is that not too long ago there was a code change that required a system can be shut off within 10’ of the solar array. It used to be you just had to be able to shut it off at the inverter (string inverter, usually mounted on the wall near the electrical panel). That would leave the wires between the array and the inverter hot even when the disconnect was opened. Because of this, most of the people who weren’t already using only microinverters (like me) started using only microinverters - which you can’t use on this system. The solution to that is a remote shutoff thing with a button down on the ground that opens a disconnect on the roof and that’s expensive and a PITA (I did plenty of them) and since the reason to not use microinverters was mostly price, I just switched to only using microinverters.
In the end it will be about price though.
Also — solar arrays after a hurricaine
But, maybe a ground mount?
Solar system got turned on two days ago. Currently hitting 22kWh with my 3.84kW system. Seems pretty good, especially since they had to put my panels on my west facing roof. At least I think so, I have no idea really.
ETA: apparently not as one of my 11 panels isn’t putting out any energy. Seems bad. At least that’s what I think is happening when I look at the detailed report. Solar guy emailed.
It’s overwhelmingly likely that it’s just the monitoring and not the actual panel/power production. The communication between microinverters (or power optimizers if that’s what you have) is fairly fussy. The power production is extremely not fussy. West facing is roughly 10% less productive than South.
22kwh a day I presume. That is good for a 3.84kw system, but this varies a ton over the course of the year. Seems good for mid-late August. It will go down from here on out as the days get shorter and the sun gets lower.
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The permitting for my house allowed them only on the west facing system. Also don’t have much roof sloping towards the south.
West is fine. I meant that more like it’s not a big deal.
There’s a law in CA about what kind of restrictions cities or HOAs can put on solar, but if it’s only that it has to be on the West instead of South (not face the street I’m sure is the restriction) it’s ok. If street facing were your only viable option they couldn’t stop you.
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Wasn’t hoa related, it’s a new build and they only had permits from the county and city to do it in a few spots.
Thanks for your advice. Sent an email asking the solar people what they thought just to be sure
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Broken panel confirmed. Fix in the next two weeks
Broken solar panel? Not the inverter? Other than the glass broken in shipping, I’ve seen one not working new panel (the wire just pulled right out of the junction on the back) ever. That’s 13 years and like 10k solar panels that I was directly involved with. Pinching the wire during installation can happen if you’re not careful. I’ve done that and seen that happen maybe twice, but it could be more common for some people. Shrug. As long as it ends up working.
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Just that the panel system isn’t working I suppose. Worded sloppily. No power is going from the panel to the system as a whole. Don’t know what is broken. It’s getting fixed. Still putting out 21-23 kwh per day though so I’m pretty happy. Expecting 8% more with this panel
You most likely got enphase microinverters and I have seen one or two of them fail new (that’s out of hundreds rather than thousands), but it’s really rare. They are extremely reliable* as far as power output goes (though finicky for data). Still, would be more likely than the panel. Could also be human error, but if they are saving face on that, nbd imo. It is a good feature of the microinverter system that something can go wrong and it only affects one panel.
- they have no moving parts and the electronics are like encased in a hard gel/plastic kind of thing.
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