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Earlier this month, in San Diego, California, a house fire started in the inverter circuitry for a rooftop solar electric panel array. Luckily, a house painter working on the site noticed the smell of smoldering wiring before things got out of hand. However, extinguishing the fire was no simple matter: Firefighters weren’t able to cut off the juice from the panels to the circuit box, and in fact, they couldn’t get the fire stopped until an electrician finally showed up to help. Here’s the story, from the San Diego North County Times (“ENERGY: Solar fire raises questions about panel safety,” by Eric Wolff).

Electrical contractor and solar installer Mark Snyder, who sent electrician Tom Doherty to deal with the situation, says the same thing has happened before, reports the North County Times: “Snyder, who has investigated electrical fires for 25 years, said he’s seen 50 solar-fed fires like this one, and on five occasions there was major damage.”

Preventing this kind of problem isn’t simple, Eric Wolff reports. Some people advocate placing a cutoff switch for the solar array in the house’s main electrical panel, so that anyone could interrupt the direct current flow from the panels to the inverter that makes AC current. But here’s the trouble: interrupting that circuit, or any other circuit, does not de-energize the solar panels themselves. As long as the sun is shining on the panels, they’re making charge. So we don’t want to give firefighters the false impression that if you throw a main switch, that makes it safe to get up on the roof and start spraying or touching PV arrays. They might still get shocked and fall off the roof, because the panels themselves are still hot.

Simple enough … but what to do? PV is set to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming decade. The lure of that market is big enough to attract investment from powerhouse companies like Dow Chemical, for instance, which is working on a solar shingle to make installing solar roofs quick and economical. Forbes Magazine has that story here (“Roofs for Rich Green People,” by Christopher Helman). But clearly, if we’re going to multiply the acreage of rooftop solar out there, it’s going to be important for manufacturers, as well as installers, to keep a close eye on safety — and to work on creating a new set of clear codes and safe practices. As a very old handbook called the Tao te Ching notes (it’s kind of an Eastern thing),

Whether something is successful or tragic

Depends on how it ends.

Everyone knows this.

How something will end

Can be determined by how it begins.

Very few know this.

If attention is given to the beginning,

There will be no tragedy.

If care is given to the ending,

There will be no failure.

He who is prepared, in other words, need not be anxious — or so I have been informed. Be safe out there, people.

This article originally appeared on REMODELING Online.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.