I like the planning people shrugging their shoulders and saying it's within GPDO rules: surely it breaks the bit about "conventional" installations? Never mind wind-loading and visual aspects.

Rgds

Damon

Can't see what they're whinging about.

It's not very pretty and I wouldn't have let an installer get away with it myself, but if the panels are adequately fixed and the installation is otherwise satisfactory I don't see the problem. Perhaps MNF can enlighten us about the really serious fault?

billt,
i was just thinking the same , if the fixing system is design correctly , windload etc. where is the problem ?
yes it looks a bodge , though

edit , good forum though , thanks for the link , will be useful
( hold on a minute, for some reason "aren't they the popular front of judea" comes to mind )

I was told by one particular mount supplier that they recommend at least .5m of tile surrounding the array, eg array inboard of ridge, gutter, and gable edges, my new array certainly will be. Presumably the mount manufacturers would deny liability in this case, in the event of wind damage. Without all the facts though it's difficult to comment.

Some mounts and panels will be designed to take upwards/shearing wind stresses and some won't.

In my case we left a decent margin all round.

Rgds

Damon

Visual impact counts for very little these days unless in a conservation area (sometimes even in a conservation area).

The building on the middle is Toesland Hall a listed building described as "one of the county's finest examples of 17th Century domestic architecture".

Appeal officer basically said any impact was only temporary because the turbines are only going be there for 25 years and that's a small fraction of the buildings 400 year life to date. Following that logic the older the building the lower the impact and the more suitable the location.

Posted By: CWattersVisual impact counts for very little these days unless in a conservation area (sometimes even in a conservation area).

well yes, this is probably true in many areas, I was just pointing out that the planning officer could have chosen to view it as being his job to step in, but opted not to, rather than it being something that was entirely outside of his remit.

Is it or is it not feasible to use PVs (and/or wet panels) as the roof covering i.e. coming right to the edges? It could have something cheap and waterproof beneath, like Onduline, with only nominal jointing between panels, if that wd help. Ignore the issue of matching the array's overall size to the roof size.

Posted By: Gavin_A

Posted By: CWattersVisual impact counts for very little these days unless in a conservation area (sometimes even in a conservation area).

well yes, this is probably true in many areas, I was just pointing out that the planning officer could have chosen to view it as being his job to step in, but opted not to, rather than it being something that was entirely outside of his remit.

I doubt that's what happened. The planners may well believe it is wrong but have decided they don't have the manpower or budget to take marginal cases to appeal. They can't admit that obviously so have to declare it permitted development.

Some planning offices are so short of resources it appears they can't even read large and important planning application let alone analyse the content properly. I don't think people realise how overloaded they are. I know of a case where a planning application contained an enviromental impact assessment on a house that had been knocked down 10 years earlier. It wasn't spotted until the appeal hearing.

Do the panels even overhang the edge? Hard to say from the photo, they could actually be in line with it but spaced off the roof enough that parallax makes them visible.

And who cares. "Worst installation of anything ever". What a load of whining ninnies.

Posted By: fostertomExample of PVs apparently used as roof covering. Looks like the plan form must have been sized to create a roof size/shape that exactly fitted the PVs module.

I guess there's a degree of flexibility in determining the overhang of the roof, and also in the pitch of the roof. And there seems to be a bit in the middle that isn't covered,presumably for shading reasons. But it does indeed look like it was designed with the panels in mind.