[RE-wrenches] Hurricane damage to solar arrays

[Jason Szumlanski]

I'm based in Fort Myers and we cover the hardest hit areas from Irma. We
are in the "stuff" right now, so I'll make this brief until I have more
time, which might be a while. We are seeing quite a bit of minor damage and
some major damage. We're getting calls from all dealers' customers and a
couple of our own clients. We have several homes with one or two panels
dislodged. There is no rhyme or reason. Some are middle of arrays, some on
edges. Panels are ripped right off rails, leads ripped from microinverters.
Strangely, it looks like the panel j-box connection and MC4 connectors
survived better than the microinverter end of the DC leads. Amazingly, we
have several panels that were blown onto driveways, other roofs, and pool
cages with NO DAMAGE except frame scrapes. Very weird. We haven't seen a
shattered panel yet, but it's early.

I'm heading to a self-storage facility tomorrow where there are three 25kw
systems on different buildings. Two buildings are unscathed. One building
lost ALL of the panels apparently. Tornado? Hard to say.

So far (other than the 25kw I have not evaluated) we have not seen a single
fastener pulled out. All of the failures are panel top and mid clamps at
this time. Anchor and rails remain intact. Possibly installation errors?
Possibly sheared off T-bolts? Hard to tell and we may never fully know.

We generally require 48 inch spacing between anchors into trusses for
engineered systems. The pullout values are pretty high. It looks like the
attachment points into the roof are not going to be the failure point in
the systems in Florida, but there is a LOT of work to be done still. It's
going to be a very interesting few months ahead!


​Jason Szumlanski
Florida Solar Design Group​
​

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 3:09 PM, James Rudolph <jamesrudolph99 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Aloha Everyone,
> I was just wondering how all the PV arrays did during these storms?
> Does Florida have higher pull out values and wind designs for their PV/H20
> systems?
> Is there any thing the rest of us could learn from all this?
> Photos?
>
>
> Mahalo Nui Loa,
>
>
> *James B. Rudolph*
>
> *Hawaii Unified*
>
> *Director of Energy*
>
> *ES Electrician # 10816*
>
> *NABCEP Certified PV Installer # 091209-155*
>
> *80*
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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