SOLAR TODAY - July/August 2010

on the cover solar careers

WORKING THE ROOF:

The SolSource Installation Crew

By Seth MaSia

at 7:00 a.M., the crew gathereD at the warehouse to load the trucks. It was a blue-sky day in Colorado, late enough in the spring that roofs were clear of frost early in the morning. By 8:30, the 10 men stood in the alley behind the worksite, putting up ladders, fastening their harnesses, organizing the ropes.

Solar design and installation firm SolSource ( solsourceinc.com) had a contract to put 6. 9 kilowatts of SolarWorld 230-watt modules ( solarworld-usa.com) onto three garage roofs at a new-construction site in a West Denver residential neighborhood. The detached, two-car garages served three three-story townhomes, each 2,400 square feet (223 square meters) and priced at $499,000. The solar arrays were expected to save each of the new homeowners about $346 per year in utility bills, at 2010 energy prices. After tax credits and rebates, the system will cost less than 1 percent of the property selling price and provide payback in about 10 years. The developer, Keith Gallegos of 5280 Urban Homes, liked those numbers: Solar was a unique selling point for his urban target market of TWINKs (Two Incomes, No Kids). He’d

with rails in place, the crew drilled through the roof for the electrical junction box. overhead power lines on the west side posed a hazard. Below: Squaring up the first module helped ensure easy alignment of the other nine.

already done three new-construction photovoltaic (PV) installations and planned at least three more this year.

“Long-term, for the customer, it’s all about
resale value,” he said. “No one else is doing solar.”
Each roof would get 10 modules, and the job
was scheduled to take about a day and a half,
using about a third of the company’s installer
staff. The project manager on this job was North
American Board of Certified Energy Practitio-
ners- (NABCEP-) certified Tom Carr, 42, who
joined SolSource in 2007 after running his own
home remodeling business. Assisting were elec-
tricians Adam Meyer, 29, and Jason Niles, 20;
senior lead installer Jason Wheeler, 28; lead
installers Armando Vasquez, 40, and Bobby
Dalton, 29, who was about to move into the
office as a sales consultant; Marc Rosenbaum,

After experiencing layoffs in
general construction, both men
were glad to be working for
a growing company with a back-
log of projects: According to Dave
Lyskawa, vice president of sales,
SolSource expected to hire another