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Comment by diafygi | Hacker News Reader

I work in solar, and your panel really, really, REALLY needs to be secured from wind. Luckily, they make ballast mounts that don't require screwing into the roof[1][2].

[1]: http://www.orionsolarracking.com/commercial-roof-mount/balla... [2]: https://www.civicsolar.com/products/racking-mounting/applica...

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Funny that we live in a world where one renewable energy source is powerful enough to (literally) blow away another.

Right which is why I believe that after the coming consumer solar revolution there will be something similar with wind energy. Especially with newer VAWT designs and areas that have a lot of wind.

They compliment each other so wind can continue producing at night.

For anyone curious, a VAWT is a Vertical-axis wind turbine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_axis_wind_turbine). I always thought these were less efficient than the conventional designs but they're clearly simpler.

Conventional designs struggle with low winds, gusty winds and winds coming from wrong direction. VAWT designs generally fare better with such non-ideal conditions, which are going to be common in residential sites.

Got it! Thanks for the input. Damn that drives up cost, though. I'll work on securing it with weights and post an update.

If that thing catch up wind and fall you'll surely have to pay a lot more. It's surprisingly quick how wind can shift large surface like this.

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