this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
160 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
58451 readers
6215 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
At least for right now it's just a test on a 100-meter length of track, but this reeks of a startup trying to innovate its way out of NIMBYs not wanting to put solar panels where they actually belong without considering why nobody has put solar panels in the middle of a railroad track before (cough rocks, dust, wildlife, vibration, and vandalism cough).
PV Magazine is neat for reading about potential new innovations, but one thing I really dislike about it is that it basically just regurgitates what solar companies say about themselves in press releases in a way that's completely uncritical. For instance:
One more reason. The reason they tell people not to lay on the tracks under the train, the freaking cables and chains that could come loose and dangle under the cars and drag along the ground that would cut you in half the long way. Those loose parts would just destroy the solar panels.
Solar panels need to be on every home and how new builds in many countries still don't require them baffles me.
Might be cause they make roof redos or fumigation even more expensive. I had a customer say they were paying 3k to get their panels removed so they could pay another 3k to fumigate the house. Almost doubled the price.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that we should require panels in new builds somehow but I don't know what the best option is.
Sounds like a scam. Houses round me had their roof tiles replaced recently and the guys just took the solar panels off and put them back on after no problem without inflating the price. Perhaps it varies on how the panels are installed, but most I have seen are just under the tiles and attached to the roof frame.
And the benefits far out way the slight extra cost of a roof retile every 20 or so years.
What sort of prices were they charging?
Why did they have to remove the panels in order to fumigate? If the company couldn't work around them then they should have found a different company.
You drop heavy ass tarps on the roof and roll them to tent a house, I'm taking couple hundred pound tarps. The workers need to be able to walk on the roof to set them up, the tarps can and have damaged panels so companies in the area don't fumigate with them on anymore.
I work closely with a fumigation company and that's what they've told us.
Seems like they could use a boom lift and work around them if they wanted to. I'm sure there's a way to cover the panels with plywood to where they wouldn't get damaged. Much cheaper and easier than removing and replacing.
You would need to screw the plywood into the roof so it doesn't shift around and damage stuff during the whole process, nobody is gonna wanna do that. Boom lifts are ocassionally used for extremely tall properties but they add to the price. You're forgetting the biggest issue though, liability. My company stopped doing fumigations cause of the liability involved. Getting the plywood on the roof is gonna take a lot of effort and more than just a boom lift, you're gonna need huge slabs of it to properly cover panels, I don't know if you've seen them but they're not small. They usually cover significant portions of the roof.
At that point it would just be cheaper to pay a company to remove them and reinstall vs all that other effort.
If there was a better way the companies would do it to make money. There just isn't unless the owner is willing to shell out and many aren't, even the rich ones and we work with A LOT of rich people. They own million dollar homes and have multiple homes all over the area.