New Solar Roof?

Like Woody said, it will definitely work, but will it work indefinitely? It is a great idea, and I am sure that it will work, but then again I have put on thousands of tiles; make that hundreds of thousands or tiles and the devil is in the details. It can be great, and it can be a disaster. Who is going to warrant the installations? Tile top to bottom on a straight south facing side without valleys and hips will shed water no problem. combine it with snow and chimneys and stack pipe flashings, and you have something different; A ROOF!Breakage is a big probem too. If they are as strong as the picture shows, that would be a plus. I have seen some of the composites break though and it will be really interesting to see how long they hold up under the blazing sun and ultraviolet rays.

I guess that they have a lot of solar roofs in Germany, so there is something to work as a base. We will see. I think it would be a great thing to have a solar roof with some of the Tesla wall units to store the power. It would be great to get off the grid.

A fully adhered single ply with a frame on the top of it that will hold the solar panels might be a more practical and economical solution.

I can understand why Musk has gone in this direction. Solar City is facing a huge long term issue with their leasing program. That is their liability in leak and replacement issues on the roofs where they own the equipment, not the homeowners. Combining the roof and the solar might look like a good solution by a too-smart-by-half guy like Musk.

But there are more issues with designing your own tile than just how to get solar built in to them. The second thing they probably considered was ease of manufacturing it. Last in line to be considered is real world on-the-roof performance.

The major tile manufacturers of tile all have brought new products that have been failures or required tweaking. Monier Cedarlite was a disaster for them and their customers. Lifetile Decktile imploded. Both company's lightweight tile were too fragile. Monier Homestead was on the market for almost two decades and had continual changes made to it to try to cut down on the hidden breakage designed into the product. The irony there was they finally got it right just before they discontinued it. And these were companies that had tile as their core business for decades.

Musk may just luck out and get it right the first attempt. Just looking at the product and knowing the issues involved with direct-nailed tile, I say that stuff had better be tough or he just made a huge mistake, liability-wise.

Nice product.