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Comment by theRealMe | Hacker News Reader

I would go even further tbh. Solar panels on the roof isn’t something that people want to hide. Nobody wants to admit it but my guess is the majority of people that get solar panels want to show them off, not hide them.

Edit: and that’s not a judgement by me either. If I had solar panels I’d want to show them off as well. They’d be a good conversation piece for neighbors.

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I put solar panels on my house in London this past year. I would have been happy to have hidden them in the roof. Lots of my neighbors are also investigating or getting solar due to the cost of electricity rising and the low cost of panels. I think the solar target market is well into the "normies" who don't care as much about showing off tech stuff.

The problem for me was that integrated options just weren't competitive for a retrofit on an old house. Having 4 panels put up and wired cost a few thousand dollars/pounds and took them about 6 hours to install. An integrated roof solution would have been 30k+ with structural roof work over weeks with permits. I'd probably still be working on it.

So it is more like do you want to pay 5x-10x to HIDE them? That's a small luxary market right now IMO.

I think the original selling point was that if you were doing new construction, and had budgeted for a "premium" roof (slate for example) then for a small percentage extra you could have solar integrated into them. And you wouldn't be hiding your "premium" roof.

Again, not something for the mass market, but more for the market that would put up slate or terracotta roofs.

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