Firefighters And Solar Panels

Today in the united states demand for solar is at an all time high and the fire.

Firefighters and solar panels.

That forces the panels to. That s good news for a warming planet. The first way is by turning off your inverter by a simple flip of the switch located on the front panel see picture below. However solar panels also present some new and challenging risks especially to firefighters.

Much inaccurate information about pv and firefighter safety has been published on the internet recently even to the point of recommendations to let it burn if solar panels are spotted on a roof. The manufacturers of solar panels state that anything that reduces or blocks the sunlight from reaching the panel surface will reduce energy production. The amount of electricity generated by solar energy is increasing exponentially. Since solar panels are everywhere from home roofs to roadside signs to supermarkets firefighter training is intended to deal with all the challenges that may arrive when fighting fire with solar products involved.

Regulations must be unified and adhered to so that renewable energy companies in all fifty states are in compliance with research based federal safety recommendations. In actual roof fires with roof mounted solar panels fire damage has involved areas of between 1 000 and 183 000 ft 2 93 and 17 000 m 2. In fact photon magazine has recorded no more than 1 incident per 10 000 installations so a house equipped with properly installed solar panels will not catch fire. In laboratory based fire tests of roof assemblies 1 2 the maximum allowable fire spread is between approximately 20 and 40 ft 2 1 9 and 3 7 m 2 depending on whether an a b or c rating is desired.

Solar panels pose an extremely low fire hazard. Marc van de velde a loss prevention expert at xl catlin discusses the issues. 10 17 16 1 2 courtesy of u s. Solar power 101 and the fire service.

Firefighters and solar panel safety. These questions pose a problem for modern firefighters and are some of the reasons the madison fire department applied for grants to install solar photovoltaic panels at their station. When fire departments arrive to a house fire where solar panels are interconnected to the power grid they have two options to kill the power on your solar panels and both ways are very quick.