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Tesla Inc. has kicked off production of its long-awaited electricity-producing shingles that Elon Musk says will transform the rooftop solar industry.
Manufacturing of the photovoltaic glass tiles began last month at a factory in Buffalo built with backing from New York State, the company said in an email Tuesday. It comes more than a year after Tesla unveiled the shingles to a mix of fanfare and skepticism.
The appeal: a sleek, clean solar product, especially for homeowners seeking to replace aging roofs. The tiles -- from most angles -- look like ordinary shingles. They allow light to pass from above and onto a standard flat solar cell.
Tesla, the biggest U.S. installer of rooftop-solar systems, piloted the product on the homes of several employees. The company expects to begin installing roofs for customers within the next few months.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 14 2018, @10:58PM (2 children)
Traditionally, we have ugly solar panels. You have to have some sort of desire to show off how nerdy or environmentally aware you are.
This new design tries to disguise the solar panels. Variations of it mimic several old-style roof materials. We get fake barrel tile, fake slate, etc.
I prefer a middle ground. Traditional panels were ugly because they were clearly add-on devices, projecting above the roof surface. There was space underneath. It didn't go all the way from edge to edge. The color wasn't the issue. The fact that it was solar wasn't the issue. It just wasn't neat and tidy.
A good design has rectangles of a size that is convenient for roof workers, perhaps 16x32 inches or 20x40 cm. They lie flat and lock together for waterproofing. They are the roof, edge to edge, with only trusses between them and the attic space. The color can be almost anything. It's fine to be maroon, olive, navy, rust, purple, charcoal, or blue.
Being able to be cut to fit complicated roofs is important, but really we should stop that crap. New buildings should have roofs that are rectangles when viewed normal to the surface, but parallelograms when viewed normal to the Earth. That is, they should be tipped rectangles. This gets the slope required for water issues, avoids joints prone to leaking, avoids material waste due to cutting, avoids a shaded side, and IMHO gives a nice clean modern look.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Monday January 15 2018, @03:47AM (1 child)
I mostly agree.
You can't have any single roof rectangle be too big in high wind areas. There has to be a high pitch and broken roof plan or the roof will generate enough lift to pick the house up in a hurricane. So it is useful to have the roof a more complicated shape.
The roof segments must overlap to be water tight over time. You want gravity to do most of the sealing. That still allows making the roof out of large tiles, many of which are actually panels. Look alike(ish) tiles that can be cut used at the peaks, joints and edges to get the size right and it'd be fine. I'm not sure that a blue PV tile look wouldn't be nice on the right house.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2018, @04:15AM
I'm in Florida, on the coast. Our houses are concrete.
Insurance companies like complicated shapes because the simple shapes were badly done. Simple shapes are strong when done right.
Consider the traditional 2-pane shape, a pair of rectangles joined at the top. The durable and obvious way to construct this is with walls (concrete in Florida) that go up to the roof. Two walls would be rectangles, and two walls would have a peak on top that makes them pentagons. This can be built with tilt-up construction.
That isn't what people built. People made all 4 walls rectangular, then added flimsy wooden triangular wall extensions on top of two of the walls. Those bits of junk would fail. Well duh... but don't blame that on the roof shape.
Concrete houses are not lifting in hurricanes. They may lift in tornadoes. The solution to that is to sink the foundation deeper. You want walls that are continuous concrete from an inch below the roof surface down to several feet under ground. Tornado resistance might not be realistic. We'd like it, but it takes some serious construction.