What about my roof?
For most people their new solar system will be installed on their roof, and the wide variety of roof materials makes it important to think about when going solar.
What are the different roofing materials? There are variations on the following themes:
Composition Shingle (asphalt) These are the very common “normal” shingle roofs that you see that are made out of asphalt and paper with a rough very small gravel like finish on top. It comes in lots of colors.
Clay Spanish Tile: This is the orange clay roof that you see very popular in the Mediterranean look. It is a durable roof, but very hard to walk on without breaking tiles.
Cement Tile: This comes in many shapes, including S shape, or flat tile shape. There are a couple of grades of this material, the cheaper being very fragile and easily broken. The common colors are grey, and red.
Wood Shake: This is a roof that has the wood shingles a specialized roof that is not very durable, nor safe in a fire zone. It doesn’t last as long as the cement and clay tile roofs.
Metal Shingle: This is an interesting roof, composed of metal tiles finished with a sprayed on sand and various colors that is very durable you can walk on it and it bends but pops right back into shape.
Standing Seam Metal Roof: This is found in many commercial and modern looking homes with the flat look with seams that come up a couple of inches every 18 inches or so. This is a very durable roof, easy to walk on.
Solar can be installed on any of the roof types, your installer will have to vary the price of your system according to the work it will take for each type. The Spanish tile, Cement tile, and wood shake roofs will have considerable more roofing to do when installing solar.
Traditionally, Cement Tile, Spanish tile roofs have required removal, then re-roof under the solar portion with asphalt shingle. Now however there are new solutions that allow installers to just remove a tile and install a footing- the problem remains however with the broken tiles that result from installers walking around placing panels- so the cost still is higher than for Asphalt shingle roof.
Asphalt shingle roofs are simple to install solar, requiring little extra work to install footings. Metal shingle as well is not as hard because you can install the footings then flash and seal the penetration without disturbing the entire roof.
Metal standing seam roofs are interesting because you can install the footings on the standing seam which requires no roofing and very simple.
The best time in all cases to install solar is if you are going to have a re-roof, this allows the installers to lay the footings before they put down the roofing material making it the best seal possible.
If you have an older roof and you want solar, you have the option to re-roof just the portion of the roof under the panels now and wait on the entire re-roof till you are ready…Then you can pay for the new roof with your savings on energy costs using solar.
