Weddle and Sons Roofing is a certified solar roof installation company based in American that recently created a time-lapse video on the speed at which it was able to replace a 4,000 square foot roof (approximately 372 sq.m) with Tesla Energy’s solar roof tiles. Weddle fitted a 15kW Tesla Solar Roof system on a house in Kansas and the full installation only took four days and included the whole kit from PV and glass tiles, and flashings.
The solar roof installation process began on a Friday prior to Weddle and Sons Roofing starting their job with the Tesla solar roof. The home’s existing roof, dry-in and double-layer underlayment was removed, and the roofing company said it took about one day to get the old roof off.
So, if you include the removal of the existing roof to the installation of the 15kW Tesla roof implementation, the full process took five days. To compare this to replacing any roof of that size, it typically takes more than a week. Amconstruct.com provides installation time estimations as shown below:
- Wooden Shingles – 3 – 4 days
- Slate Tiles and Shingles – 6 – 7 days
- Asphalt Shingles – 1 – 2 days
- Concrete Tiles and Shingles – 8 – 9 days
Tesla and Solar Energy entrepreneur, Elon Musk, said they would release Version 3 of Tesla’s Solar Roof during their third quarter earnings call back in 2019. Tesla has since scaled-up production of the solar roof technology at the New York Gigafactory. When the Version 3 announcement was made, Tesla started to invite people to apply for jobs as installers, roofers, and electricians as the company needed more resources to help with the demand of the solar roof installations.
The Version 3 solar roof installation have been picking up since the start of the year and Elon Musk used his Twitter platform to confirm the rollout of the Tesla Solar Roof throughout the United States.
As with most industries, the global pandemic became an obstacle to business production and installation, but Tesla stayed optimistic that it would get back on track as soon as possible.
During this year’s first quarter earnings call, Musk said, “And internally, we want to have at least 1,000 Solar Roof install teams with — and taking a week or perhaps a little less than a week to do an install, which gets you 1,000 a week roof installations. We see demand is good. Production is good. So, it’s really all about the install.”
The Tesla Solar Roof is currently the only roof on the market today that can pay for itself using the energy produced. It enables households to power the home at the lowest price per watt of any national provider and gives control of monthly electricity bills.
In February, Musk also hinted that there are plans for an international expansion. And at Tesla’s Battery Day, the CEO promoted the solar roof further, saying:
“So, we also introduced the lowest cost solar in the U.S. It’s only a dollar 49 a watt, and we really just simplified the whole value chain, so reduced sales and advertising, got rid of a bunch of unnecessary costs, and really are just relying upon the fact that it’s just the lowest cost, most efficient solar in the U.S., providing both a retrofit and the solar glass roof, which I think is a really great product. A hard product to make work, but it will be a major pipeline in the future.
And so, as we move more and more to sustainable energy, then effectively you end up building the solar factories and the car factories themselves with solar or with sustainable energy. Over time, you will even mine with sustainable energy, and eventually it will get to an effective emissions of zero, so that’s where things will end up."
