New member, potentially stupid north-facing roof question

[SunEagle]

I doubt that there are many shading issues, he's in the business and has one of those Solmetric SunEye tools. As far as the wind turbine goes it was installed just for show because Dave is in the business. Permits were obtained in a shady fashion using a ham radio permit and the town made him take it down about 4 years ago. I recall it was up for several years while he fought them. At that time I lived around the corner and tried to get legitimate approval for a 20KW turbine on a 120' tower and got shot down because of his battle. If they gave it to me they would have to let him have his, political BS! I even had NJ Clean Energy approval and they were going to give me over $50K toward the project. Spent $3,500 trying to get town planning board and variance approval, oh well!!!

If you check out google earth now you can see those trees to the East are very tall and will no doubt cast shadows on the lower panels facing South until the sun moves more to the West by late morning. I think that is why he added those 35 panels much higher up to get more production earlier in the day.

Too bad about the local politics giving you a hard time getting the turbine approved.

[JFinch57]

SunEagle, Yeah, there are big trees there. Dave can throw up panels quicker and easier than calling a tree climbing guy. The earlier threads mentioning getting a PE to sign off on the design is essential. There is obviously a large uplift sail effect. My 10.8KW ground mounted system has almost 5 yards of concrete anchoring it down.

[SunEagle]

SunEagle, Yeah, there are big trees there. Dave can throw up panels quicker and easier than calling a tree climbing guy. The earlier threads mentioning getting a PE to sign off on the design is essential. There is obviously a large uplift sail effect. My 10.8KW ground mounted system has almost 5 yards of concrete anchoring it down.

Careful if you add too much concrete in some types of soil it may sink.

By the way when I wright in Comic Sans font I am usually being sarcastic.

I (and others) would like to see some pics of your ground mount system.

[JFinch57]

I posted pictures in a my new post, more to follow.

[J.P.M.]

If you don't have to worry about building code and don't mind having the panels end up on the ground in high wind conditions then you don't need to do structural calculations. If you wanted for them to be designed to meet expected wind conditions then the structure is going to be very beefy and you may have to modify the existing roof structure to take the point loads from the new mounts.

I'd guess building codes are always a concern. The structure should always be checked for adequacy to the satisfaction of the requirements, and redesigned/modified as required. What justification would allow otherwise ?

[nok32]

Thanks, folks. Very helpful replies, some of you.