So The ARC Campbelltown was a project tendered out by the Campbelltown Council. So it was a building that had limitations on loading of the roof. So, it was quite a difficult installation to achieve. So, the challenges of The Arc, was the building couldn't actually hold the load of the solar panels initially, so we had to get creative with engineering, and engineer some risers that actually integrated into the existing structure of the building to hold the solar panels, the weighting of the solar panels. There was limited areas where we could instal the solar panels. The size of the system was 174 kilowatts. It was 432 panels all up, of the 400 watt commercial 72 cell panels. We used less of the panels and therefore overall, the overall load of the array was decreased. So, we could actually achieve the tender requirements with the size of the system by using less panels, and therefore less weight.
There was three roof areas that the system was spread across. There was two sections that had tilted panels, and there was also a section where the panels were laid flat on the roof. The difficult area was the area where the tilted array was, where we had like an eight metre span between fixing points where we designed these risers to hold our rails. The rails actually were a special rail that could span eight metres, and actually have the panels attached to it. There was a lot of custom engineering involved, there was quite a tricky installation. The building was not designed to support the weight of solar panels, initially. So yeah, it required a fair bit of engineering to actually overcome the obstacles, that the design of the building imposed on us.
How did The ARC install solar power when the roof wasn't designed to support the weight of solar panels?
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