Rooftop Racking Design Using IronRidge
IronRidge is the manufacturer of the rooftop racking system most widely used by HAREI members. IronRidge has an online tool to layout your solar arrays. It generates get a Bill of Materials (BOM) used in process of getting quotes and engineering documents to supplement your building permit. A YouTube video that provides an overview of the IronRidge rooftop mounting products and a how-to on using their design tool. A link to the video is here. The section on how to use the IronRidge Design Assistant starts about 34 minutes into the video.
Once you have set-up your project, you can share it with others by picking the "people" box in the top left of the Project.
Some notes and tips on using the IronRidge Design Assistant follow:
Configuring your project
At the top of the Project Information form there are check boxes for Design Style, Quick Mode and Image Based. Quick Mode works well if you are certain about the configuration of your arrays and their placement on the roof. Image Based is a useful tool if you need to play around with locations and offsets from the eave, ridge, hips and valleys.
When selecting your panel first search for the manufacturer. This will give you a much shorter list to search when looking for the specific panel.
Most HAREI users opt for the Square Bolt (vs. T-bolt) for attachment hardware. Although you have to get Square Bolts all on your rail ahead of time, they are less cumbersome to work with if you are not using a drill, which will occur when you are making adjustments.
Image Based Design Style
Once your house is centered on the screen, use the rotate icons to make the edge of the roof horizontal on the screen. The tool will snap to horizontal and vertical position when you initally sketch your roof planes. If the lines you are drawing are not horizontal or vertical, it can be difficult to make square corners.
This tool allows you to sketch your roof planes on a Google Maps aerial image. These images can be skewed which can result in very inaccurate sizes for your roof planes; it can be off by as much as 2 feet. Use the measurements you have taken to more accurately draw your roof planes.
Take care to draw the edges of the roof plane the lengths you want the first time. Although you can make adjustments, it is a challenge to maintain perpendicularity and parallelism.
Staggered mounting of the feet is desired to distribute the load evenly. The IronRidge Design Assistant will do this. Users often miss the feature. It is in the top left corner of the aerial image displayed on the Project Configuration page.