A good solar power company will have a checklist of issues to be avoided when installing solar panels on your roof. Ours told us a tree in the garden was likely to cast too much passing shade, diminishing the solar electricity output, and they advised us to remove some of the top branches. We were also told the panels were prohibited by regulations from being installed too close to our chimney. However, there are some issues which will be unique to your house and which the installers may not anticipate.
We were expecting the solar panels to be installed across the roof with the same amount of gap at the left and right hand edges. That seemed the obvious way to do it, for visual symmetry. But then we realised we had planning permission to put a window through into an attic room on the roof's left hand side . The window had never been installed. If the solar panels were placed symetrically, they would overlap the prospective window's position, preventing us ever installing it. So we asked for the panels to be placed to the right of centre.
A potentially more serious problem arose from the nature of the roof itself. This was in the time of Covid and we were reluctant to allow too many strangers into the house. The installers assured us all the work could be done from the outside. Our house is a former bungalow with an attic conversion. From the front, you can't tell there are upstairs rooms, because all the upstairs windows are at the back. This was lucky for solar because the front faces south and having windows at the front would have seriously cut down the number of panels that could be installed. When the installation was almost finished, we noticed an area where tiles had been temporarily removed to make a hole to pass in the electric cables. To our horror, this would have punched through the plasterwok in the ceiling of an upstairs room. Having only seen the front of the house and its wide roof expanse without windows, the installation team had not realised there were rooms in the attic space. Luckily, we were in time for them to push the cables through lower down, avoiding any plastered ceilings.
The moral of this story is to give the installers a guided tour of your house, front and back, inside and outside, so they can be fully aware of anything out of the ordinary they need to take account of.
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