Fred Lahser has been a Green Sun Energy Services client since June of 2017, when a new roof and the removal and reinstallation of an existing solar array were booked together. The roof was finished on 30 August 2017.
Two layers off, 2,600 square feet on
This roof had been covered over once already, so two layers of old shingle came off down to the sheathing rather than one. Deck protection went over the exposed sheathing, then a GAF Timberline HDZ system carrying a 50-year warranty, aluminum drip edge along 234 feet of rakes, eaves and valleys, and a ridge vent along the peak.
14 panels down and back up
The array is a compact one: fourteen panels at 255 watts, 3.57 kW in total, on QuickMount flashed mounts with an Enphase M215 microinverter behind each panel. All of it came off for the roof and all of it went back.
An array whose electronics live on the roof
The M215 is an early-generation microinverter, and like every microinverter it sits underneath its own panel rather than in a box on the wall. That is the design’s great advantage in ordinary use — each panel performs on its own, and shade or a fault on one takes only that one out of the day — and it is what makes a reset different from resetting a string array. Fourteen panels came off and fourteen sets of electronics came off with them, were handled, and went back. On a string system the inverter would never have left the wall.
Why a roof under an array gets done properly or not at all
An array is fastened down for decades and the roof beneath it has to outlast it, or the whole exercise repeats. Here the shingles had been covered over once and had reached the end; the panels had not. The order that made sense was down, two layers off, new roof, back up — and the array now sits on a deck that was stripped, seen and covered new, with a 50-year system under it rather than the second-hand roof it spent its first years on.
Project Facts
- Location
- Springfield, NJ
- Services
- Roofing Installation, Solar Removal/Replacement
- Client since
- June 2017
- System
- GAF Timberline Lifetime Roofing System
- Area replaced
- 2,600 sq ft
- Warranty
- 50 years
Roofing questions from Springfield homeowners
Will gutter guards stop ice dams on a Springfield home?
No. Ice dams come from snow melting on the warmer parts of a roof and refreezing at the colder edge, which is driven by attic heat loss, insulation, air leakage, ventilation and the weather. Keeping the gutters clear is worth doing, but it is not a substitute for the attic and roof design that causes the problem.
Should new solar mounting hardware be used when a roof is replaced?
New roof-interface and mounting components are often advisable, because they create a newly flashed mounting system rather than depending on aging penetrations or attachment components. The mounting-system manufacturer's instructions ultimately control whether existing parts can be reused.
What is an architectural shingle?
A laminated shingle built up in layers to give the roof dimension and shadow rather than the flat appearance of a traditional three-tab. The laminated construction is also what carries the manufacturer's bonding and nailing technologies, so the difference is not only how it looks.