This is one of my pet peeves, installers that don’t take the time to keep the appearance of their installation clean and neat. I hate looking up on the roof and seeing conduit run all over the place without regard for appearance.
Outside of the appearance of this array there are actually several really bad installation errors made with this system.
- Look at the conduit clearance on the roof, there is none, it is directly attached to the roof. I will cut this installer slack in this case because the NEC (national Electric Codes) were put in place after this installation that require space or require the wire to be derated because of the additional heat caused by the roof.
- The conduit attachment to the roof is unacceptable, the installer in this case sealed the conduit clamps with silicone. Silicone doesn’t stick to roofs and an asphalt or butyl based product should have been used. Ideally a flashed connection would be the best practice.
- To fix the conduit appearance the conduit should have been hidden under the solar array before the solar modules were installed.
- The roof penetration is one of the worst I ever inspected. The installer literally used a hole saw through the roof and the soffit below than sealed the hole with silicone. Every installation I came across the silicone didn’t stick and water ran through the roof.
