Projects, start to finish

Commercial rooftop

Two projects that other people had already made complicated — one abandoned mid-build, one caught between two city departments.

Battery and whole-home backup

Houses that stay on when the utility does not. Both run whole-home backup, both needed the main service rebuilt to carry it.

Roofs, tile and code

The projects where the roof or the code was the hard part, not the solar.

Permits, utilities and the calendar

Eight Granada Hills projects where the hard part was neither the roof nor the equipment. Site conditions, service reviews and handoffs between two city bodies are what decided how long each one took.

Granada Hills: the service, the panel and the meter

Much of the housing here was built with a service that suited the house and does not suit an array. Six projects decided by the label inside the panel door rather than by the roof.

Granada Hills: roofs, mounts and what is underneath

Concrete tile, composition shingle and hipped post-war roofs. Five projects about attachment, sequencing between trades and what the covering is hiding.

Granada Hills: accessory dwellings

A second dwelling with its own main panel and its own meter is a separate service, a separate application and a separate address. Four projects on what that changes.

Sherman Oaks

A city of tear-downs and rebuilds: most of our work in these ZIP codes is on houses that did not exist three years earlier, with solar designed into the build rather than retrofitted afterwards. Two of these are for the same builder.

Chatsworth

Older tile roofs on one side of this ZIP code and new flat-roofed builds on the other, which makes the roof itself the design problem more often than the equipment. One of these is a system we came back to three years after installing it.

Sylmar

Older houses at the north end of the Valley, where the roof and the service panel come up in the same conversation as the solar. Two of these are systems we went back to years after installing them.

Winnetka

A neighborhood being rebuilt lot by lot: second dwellings, accessory units and older houses whose service panels came up in the same conversation as the array. Four of these are properties with more than one dwelling on them.

Canoga Park

Two houses where the roof had to be settled before anything else could happen: one taken apart tile by tile and put back over new underlayment, one replaced outright. Both ended with an array on top.

West Hills

Large roofs that take an array across four or five planes, and lots deep enough for a second dwelling with its own service and its own interconnection.

Northridge

Our own neighbourhood, and the one with the widest range of work in the archive: twenty projects running from the largest residential array we have built to the smallest, with plan checks, tile roofs, new services, a utility incentive paid out and the service calls that came years afterwards.

North Hollywood

The city of accessory dwelling units, and the widest run of utility and service work in the archive: projects covering new second dwellings, tile and shingle roofs, meters and records, and warranty claims years after switch-on.

Permitting and utility problem-solving

Five projects where the building and the equipment were never the difficulty. What decided each one was knowing which step the process was sitting on, which rule applied and who had to move it.

Sun Valley

Four projects in one Los Angeles ZIP code where the permit route, not the roof or the equipment, set the calendar: a payment that would not clear, a permit left open on the property years before the solar, an express permit issued with no plan check, and two neighboring properties that reached permission to operate on the same day by different routes.

Studio City

Nine projects in 91604, where most solar arrives on a lot that has just been cleared and rebuilt. The recurring lesson is that the utility is rarely the slow part: the calendar belongs to the building, the metering and the handoffs between them — and two of these are roofing jobs where the array was the complication, not the work.

Tarzana

Nine projects in 91356 and 91335, where the roof is usually the constraint: concrete tile on the hillside streets, low-slope built-up roofs north of the boulevard. Three of these turn on a service question rather than an array — a main breaker derated instead of a panel replaced, a meter panel rebuilt where the utility said, and an accessory dwelling unit whose permit and work request sat under two different addresses.

Glendale

Eleven projects in a city that runs its own utility. Glendale Water & Power approves the interconnection before Building & Safety will open a plan check, sizes anything above 10 kilowatts AC against the last twelve months of bills, spots the meter on site, and treats a battery as a separate interconnection of its own. Four of these turn on that machinery; the rest are roofs — Spanish tile, hipped planes too small for a rectangle, and a flat built-up roof from 1938.

Encino

Twelve projects in 91316 and 91436, where the house is usually older than the electrical service it runs on. Four of these turn on what the main panel can carry — a busbar rebuilt for storage, a main breaker derated for tile, a microinverter variant that changes the backfeed, an interrupt rating the utility demands before it will set a meter. The rest are the work around them: a roof replaced before the array, an addition that had to run as its own system, a new build handed over with the map of its own equipment, a one-day installation, a commissioning visit fifteen months after the modules went up, and two documents — a correction notice and a service release — that decide schedules more often than equipment does.

Situations we have worked through

Shorter write-ups, each built around one problem a homeowner or builder brought us — and what it took to clear it.

The 153 case studies at a glance

System sizes and utility territory for every case study on this page.

What these projects have in common

Frequently asked

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