Weight of Solar Panels

Solar Energy Podcast

Will my roof require extra support for solar panels? Listen to the scoop from Dillon.

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Transcript of podcast:

Hello everybody, this is Dillon Holmes. You are listening to the Cambio Energy Solar Podcast.

I have a question about the weight of solar panels. Is my house going to be strong enough to hold the solar panels?

The answer is usually, yes your house is strong enough. You always inspect the roof and make sure. I have never come across a house that wasn’t already built strong enough to hold the solar panels including the down force and uplift from wind and everything.

Solar only adds about 3 pounds per square foot. A solar panels weights 30, 40 pounds at the most. Pretty much every residential rooftop can handle the extra weight. Unless you have a really old house that is not built to code in the way that homes are built nowadays, then you might need to do some things to beef up your roof. I have never had it happen on a residential.

On a commercial where some flat roofs didn’t need to be strong to hold extra weight, they were minimally built, I have had to beef up the rafters underneath in order to hold the extra weight of solar. But, it only happened in 1 little case.

You would always run engineering and check it out. More often then not, solar is not that heavy and so it’s no problem.

That of course is Arizona. I don’t know if that is different in snow areas. I don’t think it would be. I can’t think of a reason why it would be any different because if you have solar and snow on top of it, what’s the difference.

That’s the scoop on weight, keep the questions rolling in.

Thanks for listening.

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