Re-Roofing Under Solar Panels: What It Costs in Inglewood
Detach-and-reset runs about $1,500 to $3,500 on a typical Inglewood array, and one upsell while the panels are down can cost you the NEM 2.0 rate.
Do the roof first. If the covering under your array has fewer than about ten years left in it, replacing it while the panels are already down is the cheapest version of that job you will ever be offered, because you pay for the panel labor once instead of twice.
Panel labor is the line homeowners never budget for. Pulling an array off, racking and all, stacking it somewhere safe, then setting it back and re-terminating every connection is a separate scope from the roofing itself. On a normal Inglewood house — sixteen to twenty-four modules on a single-story ranch off Hillcrest or Grevillea — budget roughly $1,500 to $3,500 for that alone, on top of whatever the roof costs.
What moves the panel number up or down
- Module count and inverter type. Microinverters put a device under every panel, so there are far more connections to break and remake than on a string system with one inverter hanging on the garage wall.
- Whether the racking gets reused. Rails from 2016 are usually still good. The lag bolts and the flashings around them are not, and reusing either is how a solar house starts leaking.
- Conduit runs. Every penetration through the deck comes out and goes back through new flashing. A system with three roof penetrations is a different day from one with a single run.
- Where the modules wait. A driveway is fine. A back yard with no gate wide enough means panels go over a fence by hand, and that is another two people for half a day.
- Roof geometry. One long south-facing plane resets quickly. An array split across three planes of a hip roof does not.
Who pays depends on whose name is on the equipment
Bought outright or financed with a loan, the array belongs to you and so does the invoice. On a lease or a power purchase agreement, the company that owns the hardware is responsible for taking it down and putting it back, and you should push hard on any quote that quietly hands you that cost.
What a lease really costs you is calendar. The owner-company dispatches its own crew on its own schedule, and several weeks between the removal appointment and the reinstall appointment is common. Our part — tear off, dry in, finish — is usually two or three working days. The waiting is everything else. Line those dates up before anybody starts, and do not begin the sequence in December.
The expensive mistake here is electrical, not structural
Inglewood sits in Southern California Edison territory. If your system was interconnected under net energy metering 2.0, that rate is locked for twenty years counted from your permission-to-operate date — not the contract date, and not the day the modules went up.
Taking the same panels off and putting the same panels back does not disturb it. Growing the system does. Across California's big investor-owned utilities, adding more than 1 kW or 10 percent of the original system size, whichever is greater, moves the entire array onto the current Solar Billing Plan. Export credits under that plan are worth a fraction of what 2.0 pays, and the change applies to the whole system, not only the new modules.
Which is why the answer is no when somebody standing on your fresh underlayment suggests adding four panels while the crew is up there anyway. Four panels is a couple thousand dollars of hardware weighed against fifteen-odd remaining years of a rate you cannot buy back at any price. If you genuinely need more production, price it as its own decision with the numbers in front of you, not as an add-on during a re-roof.
The paperwork that stalls people
Edison wants evidence that the original system came down before the reinstalled one is granted permission to operate, and installers generally cover that with dated photographs and a revised interconnection package. It is not difficult. It is just a step that gets skipped when a roofer and a solar company are each assuming the other one owns it.
The roof and the photovoltaic work are separate permits through the city's Building & Safety Division, and the electrical inspection cannot pass until the array is back up and terminated. Ask who is pulling which permit before anyone quotes you a completion date.
Every mount is a hole somebody has to own
A mount is a lag bolt driven through sheathing into a rafter with flashing over the top. That interface causes more leaks on solar houses than the open field of the roof does, and it is precisely where the roofing warranty and the solar warranty meet and quietly stop.
We set every flashing new — new base flashing, fresh sealant, a new lag landed in sound framing, never back down an old hole in tired sheathing. Reusing a mount location saves maybe fifteen minutes per panel, and it is the worst trade available in this job.
Get it in writing from both companies: who answers the phone when a stain shows up on the ceiling under the array. If neither will put a name to that, you have learned how the callback is going to go.
Corrosion matters more this close to the water than people expect. Playa del Rey is about four miles west and the marine air reaches these blocks most nights. Plated steel hardware that would last twenty years out in Riverside goes chalky and seizes here in a fraction of the time. Specify stainless or aluminum at every fastener and make somebody write it down.
Season matters more than you would think
LAX records roughly a foot of rain in an average year, and almost all of it arrives November through March. An open deck, a disassembled array and a second crew that has to come back is not a December project. May through September is the window, and it happens to be when solar companies have the most slack in their schedules too.
When we tell people not to bother
If the roof went on around the same time as the array and both are inside twelve years, leave it alone. Spending three thousand dollars in panel labor to renew a covering with fifteen years left is money set on fire, and we would rather say so now than sell it to you and hear about it later.
One more thing worth knowing. The deck under an array often outlasts the exposed sections around it, because the modules shade the covering from the UV that ages it. It is normal to open a solar house and find the shaded slope in visibly better condition than the bare one beside it. That does not always change the recommendation, but it does sometimes change the scope, and it is a good reason to have somebody look before assuming the whole roof is finished.
Send the array size, the install year and the age of the covering when you ask for a quote, and we can usually tell you over the phone whether this is a now job or a five-years-from-now job. Our roofing services page spells out what a tear-off actually includes.