1) Notice they chose the simplest roof configuration possible. A straight gable roof with zero valleys. Don’t see many of those in San Diego.
2) I also notice these are very glossy and straight-edged panels, Seems like they showed a more traditional roof tile look when they first unveiled the solar roof a year or two back. Or maybe my memory is bad.
3) These tiles look very slippery – good luck to any repairman that should need to get on your roof for vent repair, etc.
4) Don’t know if you caught it, but he said the entire roof is made up of “solar CAPABLE panels”. Do you know why he said that? Because there are california laws about where on the roof you can put solar panels! Back when I had mine installed, there had to be a 3ft setback from all roof edges and ridges. I just looked it up and now they’ve relaxed it a bit, but it is still significant:
If you look closely, those non-solar panels along the edge aren’t 18 in wide, so I bet that means that the first actual solar tile along all edges won’t be active either. That means a lot of inactive tiles!
5) One of the things I like about my panels sitting up off the roof is all the heat generated from the sun hitting the black panels doesn’t radiate directly into my attic…there is an air buffer that can dissipate the heat before it transfers. In fact, I actually thought my attic fan (which activates when attic reaches 120 degrees or so) was broken because it hasn’t come on it a couple of years. However, it did kick on once recently so I am thinking the solar panels with the air gap have actually reduced my attic temp!
I’m wondering how hot that guy’s attic is gonna get with a shiny black surface sitting right on his roof’s plywood.
6) Just imagine the number of electrical connectors required to join all those tiles. All of those connections getting beat by the heat in the attic or on the roof. How many of those do you think are going to go bad over the course of 25 years? Even if they are under warranty, there is still downtime waiting for Tesla to repair them, and let’s hope that one bad connection doesn’t disable all panels downstream…
Is a solar roof a good idea? Yes, I think so. I’m just not convinced all the drawbacks have been considered and addressed.
