Attendees of SOMO, the Solar Mounting Conference, get an up-close look at a mounting product from IronRidge.
Daniel Schippers, the owner of Solar Solutions AZ, made a good point to me at SOMO this week. He said anyone can install a solar system according to code, but what sets an installation company apart is installing to code and best practice.
“Code is a minimum standard,” he said. “It’s the worst acceptable way you can do a project and get away with it, while best-practice is the best way you can do it. Best practice is I would do that for my roof, or for my grandfather’s roof.”
Schippers and more than 200 other solar installers spent three days learning best-practices for solar mounting installation from the people who know best: the companies that design and manufacture the systems used in the field. SOMO, which is short for Solar Mounting Conference, brought together many of the top solar mounting manufacturers for a three-day, hands-on conference and workshop in Las Vegas from August 16 to 18.
“At a big show like SPI you walk by and get pitched, but here you walk by and get trained and receive more in-depth information,” Schippers said. “The training sessions had knowledge that I can take home.”
The brain-child of metal roof attachment manufacturer S-5!, SOMO is the first and only conference exclusively dedicated to solar mounting. Multiple classrooms featured demonstration roofs, where mounting experts and attendees tried their hands at solar installation.
From attendees and manufacturers alike, I heard that the show was useful.
“I think SOMO is a needed show,” said Wayne Lee, a regional sales manager at mounting provider Renusol, one of the participating companies. He said you can only connect with a customer so much through a webinar or at a large conference, where customers have limited ability to interact with a product.
“Racking is a hands-on component” Lee said. “It’s a completely different experience handling it yourself.”
Solar design engineer Karen Gygi said she attended SOMO to see how the mounting components she regularly prescribes for projects fit together.
“I’m not on the job site—I do visits so sometime, but I don’t see all the parts and how they go together,” Gygi said. “SOMO is really informative in that way.”
Bonding manufacturer Wiley was among the event sponsors that were not mounting manufactures. Others included Interplay Learning, SolarWorld, Clean Energy Distribution, Civic Solar and Kaplan. Wiley does, however, often partner with mounting manufacturers and has products that are connected to racking.
“A lot of people here use our products,” said Sarah Parsons, product specialist at Wiley. “SOMO is good for us because it’s an intimate setting and a good way to receive feedback on products from the mounting companies and installers.”
In addition to class time and hands-on workshops, which earned attendees NABCEP credit, the conference included two keynote addresses. Jeff Spies, senior director of policy at Quick Mount PV, discussed UL 2703 as well as the push to keep net metering at the full retail rate in California. Yann Brandt discussed the top stories that appeared on his blog, Solar Wakeup, and what issues are ahead for the solar industry.
During an address to the crowd, Keith Lipps, vice president of marketing and sales at S-5!, said a second SOMO is currently in the works.
Presenting companies at SOMO 2015 included Solar SpeedRack, IronRidge, Quick Mount PV, Mounting Systems, S-5!, Sollega, Unirac, Everest Solar, Roof Tech, SolarEdge, PanelClaw, Renusol/RBI Solar, SolarWorld, Burndy, SunLink, Zilla, DPW Solar, Anchor Products, Clean Energy Distribution, Pegasus Solar and Enphase.
Sponsors included SolarWorld, Clean Energy Distribution, Kaplan, Interplay Learning, Civic Solar, SEIA and NABCEP.
