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Residential rooftop PV at volume

A technician on the roof, not an estimate off imagery

Rooftop PV at volume, where speed and repeatability decide the margin. Surveys, plan sets and permits on one capture standard, at a flat price per site.

$275Flat, per site
48 hrsSurvey to deliverable
6 daysSurvey to permit-ready
<1 in3D model accuracy

The desktop layout is costing you modules

Most residential roofs get designed off satellite imagery. Nobody knows exactly what is up there, so the design carries a blanket keep-out and the array shrinks to whatever is definitely safe. You lose modules to precaution, not to physics.

1

Precautionary exclusions

An unmeasured vent becomes a three-foot exclusion zone because nobody can prove it is smaller. Multiply that by every penetration on the roof.

2

The redesign

One obstruction in the wrong place turns a finished layout back into a draft, after the customer has already seen and approved it.

3

The electrical surprise

A 100A bus where the design assumed 200A. Found on install day, it costs you the day and sometimes the job.

How the work runs

Four steps, and the second one is the only one that cannot be done remotely.

1. On-site survey, by a technician

Not a desktop estimate and not a drone alone. A trained technician is physically at the property within 48 hours: on the roof measuring planes, azimuth and pitch, in the attic assessing rafter size, spacing and sheathing, and at the service panel checking bus rating, main breaker and interconnection path. Structural and electrical are both assessed on site, by the person standing there.

2. A dimensioned 3D model

The capture becomes a 3D roof model accurate to less than an inch. Every plane with a real area, pitch and azimuth. Every vent and skylight located. The blanket keep-out collapses onto the real hardware and the array re-flows around it.

3. Engineering off real data

Structural and electrical engineering from the precise model and what the technician verified. Battery and inverter placed at the service entrance, conduit sized and routed to the array, attachments landed on real rafters rather than assumed ones.

4. Permit-ready

Stamped and sealed by a licensed professional engineer, structural and electrical, permit-ready six days from the survey.

What gets captured

One visit, both halves of the job. The full standard is published in the site survey checklist.

Roof and structure

  • Measured roof planes, pitch, azimuth, dimensions
  • Every penetration and obstruction, located to the inch
  • Rafter or truss size, spacing and span, from inside the attic
  • Decking type, thickness and condition
  • Layer count at a cut edge
  • Setbacks and fire pathway constraints
  • Full horizon shading capture per array area

Electrical

  • Main breaker rating and bus bar rating, photographed separately
  • Meter location and configuration
  • Slot count, used, open, tandem and double-tapped
  • Available interconnection points
  • Existing loads and sub-panels
  • Conduit route, measured along the actual path
  • Grounding electrode and bonding path

One price, every site

Flat $275 per site. No tiers, no per-site quoting, and no surprise line item when a roof turns out to be complicated. The complicated ones are exactly the ones you most want surveyed properly.

A flat price only works if the capture is a fixed spec rather than a judgement call. That is the whole reason the number holds, and it is the same reason the 48 hours holds: there is nothing to go back for. We looked at what that discipline is worth in two technicians, two roofs.

Whether it pays for you

Adding storage changes the survey more than most installers expect. The capture list is in what a battery adds to the site survey. If you are weighing in-house against outsourced, the arithmetic is built line by line in the algorithm no one is running, and the number that moves it is utilization.

Talk through your residential volume

Bring your monthly job count. We will tell you whether outsourcing is cheaper for you specifically.

Book a 15-min call
Book a 15-min call