Welcome to Eagle, Colorado. The town of Eagle is just west of Vail, Colorado by about 30 miles on I-70 in the Central Rocky Mountains. In this video I wanted to share with you a municipal solar installation that I was responsible for with Sunsense.  The project location is the Eagle County Government Campus, which is this area here. The client requested that Sunsense install on two buildings, the financial building as well as the facilities building, about 50 kilowatts worth of solar, and that would be used to offset about 50% of that meter’s current usage. 

Now this project had many challenges, but the biggest challenge was probably the 40 plus roof angle that the crews had to install on. This was a standing seam roof, but because of that we had to take extra safety precautions with our tie-ins on the ridge line of the roof to make sure everybody was safe during the entire installation. Now here you can see our designer's racking out of the financial building, and you can see there's dimensions throughout, and these dimensions are very helpful to our crews because when they are out in the field, they need to verify whether the plans reflect the real conditions properly. You can also see here that a quick calculation was done to further understand what impact of added weight this design would have on the structure.  There is about 2.76 pounds per square foot, which is not a lot when you think about it, but it is a number that we must verify to know that the structural integrity of our design is complete. 

Once the crews are out in the field, the first thing they do is measure the infield conditions so that we can make sure that the layout is going to be proper. And here once the verifications have been done, the crew starts to build the racking after placing the standing seam clamps down on the standing seams. You can see here an aesthetic decision being made because of the two gables and the array being in the middle of them. The crews wanted to pay special attention to centering this array evenly on both sides so that not only does it look centered, but the lines that occur from the spaces between the modules will also run parallel with the standing seam roof lines themselves. Now our crews were amazing on this steep roof. I learned a few tricks and for all your newbies out there, one thing you can do as safety precaution is to spread a little sugary soda on the standing seam roof, let it dry, and then you can walk on the roof with much more traction.

The panelization of the project was equally challenging. Imagine carrying an extra 40 pounds of weight on the shoulder up the steep roof. Well, our crews did it seamlessly and everyone here took turns carrying different components to their respective locations. When the panels are being installed on the racking, you can see that this crew wanted to start at the bottom and then panelize from the top down. The reason behind this is so that they can have two square edges to put a new panel and that was a successful strategy for this installation.

This is the finished product of the financial building.  As you can see, the black-on-black modules with black frames are really blending into the architecture and when you pass this building, you barely notice that there is solar on the building at all unless you knew what you were looking for. The facilities building was equally as easy, but a little bit smaller in scope and they decided to place the racking from the top down because they had tie-in clamps to use for the ropes and they felt that this would be the best strategy for this site.

You can see them building the racking and then adding the panels and lastly, they have a finished product from a panel install standpoint, but then they must wire.  You can imagine pulling all the wire through conduit on the interior of the building, but first you need to enter the interior from the top of the roof in which you installed the solar panels on. Once you are inside, you have lots of different angles.  You must bend pipe and take this wire to an inverter and a point of interconnection to your grid.  This is the facilities project finished and this is both the financial building and the facilities structure finished.  Since this project, Sunsense has done several other projects with Eagle County, Colorado and we continue to build our relationship with them and look forward to our next project for any municipal party that is interested in solar photovoltaic or energy storage installation.