Solar Panel Installation and Roofing Installation in East Brunswick, NJ | Our Own Array Off and Back On

East Brunswick, NJ · Client since June 2019

HsiaoChung Huang has been a Green Sun Energy Services client since June of 2019, when we installed an 18-panel array. Two years later the roof underneath it reached the end of its life, so the same array came off, the roof was replaced, and the panels went back.

18 panels and 6.03 kW, in 2019

Eighteen LG 335 watt panels came to 6.03 kW on rail-free mounting, finished on 12 August 2019, running into a SolarEdge SE5000H HD Wave inverter with an optimizer on every panel. Critter guard went on at the same time — 116 feet of mesh around the array perimeter. PSE&G is the utility.

A very steep roof, pointing almost due south

The array sits on the front slope at a pitch of 43 degrees, which is steep for a domestic roof, at an azimuth of 175 degrees — within five degrees of due south. The design models it at 99.5 percent of the reference case. A pitch that steep is harder to work on and sheds snow readily, and combined with a southerly aspect it sits close to the ideal geometry for this latitude.

2021: 3,200 square feet, and 495 feet of edge

The old shingles came off down to the sheathing and left with the dumpster. Deck protection went over the exposed sheathing, then a GAF Timberline system in Pewter Gray carrying a 50-year warranty, with aluminum drip edge along 495 feet of rakes, eaves and valleys and a ridge vent along the peak. Four hundred and ninety-five feet of edge on 3,200 square feet is a great deal of shape — a roof cut into many faces, with a valley or a hip everywhere two of them meet, and every one of those seams a place that has to be right.

Taking down an array we put up ourselves

There is a particular clarity to removing your own work. Nobody had to guess how the mounts were fastened, what was under the flashings, or how the array was wired, because the crew doing the reset had the record of the installation two years earlier. The panels came off, the roof was replaced properly beneath them, and they went back onto a deck that had been stripped and covered new.

The bush in front of the electric meter

One line in the 2019 contract asked the household to remove a bush in front of the electric meter before the installation. It is a small item and it is the kind of thing that stops a job on the morning it starts. An installer needs clear access to the meter and the service; a shrub that has been there for years is invisible to everyone except the person who has to work behind it. Naming it in writing, weeks ahead, is how it gets dealt with instead of discovered.