Microinverter power distribution basic overview

[doc3g]

So I don’t know much about ground mount permitting. There is a weird situation where
DIYers super love them but some contractors I’ve randomly talked to on Reddit say they add a lot of permitting and site planning cost compared to roof mounts. You might search here for folks that did permitted ground mounts. Also the extra red tape PITA of ground mounts may point to just doing off grid

Roof mounts require you to go on a roof and make some holes/share fate with your roofing situation, but they also inherit wood construction rules (IE, your house is properly bolted to a foundation, and it has properties from standard framing, and the weight of your whole house is helping to hold down the panels) / are super streamlined and optimized from an engineering and review POV. Roof mounts also have a higher chance of random complaints and scrutiny (but it’s easier to get them 100% kosher so in my mind it cancels out).

The man can see stuff from drones pretty easily, but it’s probably less likely for you to hit a drive by snitching situation for a ground mounts vs a roof mount


It’s $300 for a roof stamp when I did it, the engineering might be more streamlined because you can use standard wood building manual for this (and in my town they actually don’t care about stamps if the framing is above a certain strength, and accept simply the pre-engineered tables from the racking manual).

Remember the engineer is going to cover their asses since they have professional liability

My only reason for preferring the ground mount at this point is because I have almost no south-facing roof space. The best roof I have for solar faces east and has significant shading throughout the day from the chimney and the pine trees on my neighbor's property.

I live sort of in the country (~ town has a population of ~8K) with no HOA and at the end of a dead-end street. Additionally, I have a good relationship with all of my neighbors, so I'm not too concerned about someone complaining. My POCO is technically Oncor but I have a different retailer, so I don't know if Oncor is flying drones over my house or not (seems like they have better things to do with their time, lol).

Again, I appreciate your input on this and am enjoying learning about solar. Hopefully, whatever the final configuration ends up being, will be simple enough that I can write it up so that others can have a reference for their projects.