The Pegasus Solar mount for sloped asphalt shingle roofs.
Pegasus Solar was among the solar mounting manufacturers that exhibited at SOMO, the solar mounting conference. Relatively new to the market, this was the company’s second conference appearance. As such, Solar Power World caught up with CEO Kai Stephan to ask a few questions about his product offering.
What is your product?
We manufacture rail-less solar mounting systems for composition and tile roofs.
What’s the history of Pegasus?
We were founded in 2012. We have launched our LightSpeed Residential Mount in the US with the goal of standardizing the industry with a truly easy, fast, and lower cost rail-less mounting system. We are currently supporting a very large number of installations with top installers across the country.
Do you do your own installations?
We do not install our own system but training and supporting our installation partners. We are helping them with our best-practices so they are as happy and successful as we are with our system. It’s innovative and intuitive but may be unfamiliar with some people. We want everyone to understand our mesh grounding technology and how to use our online design tool.
What is the Pegasus value proposition?
Our product is at or below comparable rail cost, and substantially lower when including the labor and logistics since we offer free shipping to continental US. We are half the weight and no rails everywhere so the guys on the roof are getting off and going to lunch early.
What’s different about your technology?
We have 1 standard tool top down on 2 SKUs: flashing and mounting assembly. Our flashing stack extremely compact and our mounting assemblies do 3 things at once: attach the modules to the roof, easy leveling with 1/8” turn per rotation, and capping the lag screw to the rafter.
We have developed a proprietary corner hinge system that are installed on standard module frames at the panel manufacturer, and delivered to the installer fully ready to install out of the pallet. Our corners add a substantial amount of strength to the module yet do not trigger an onerous UL relisting.
Our system allows for portrait, landscape, or mixed orientation, with row-to-row terracing since our rows are independent from one another. We also have the industry’s first self-aligning system since our corner hinges perfectly align modules in a row and the rows are aligned by the mounts.
Where did the idea for Pegasus come from?
I was working at SoCal Edison on the Prologis multi-MW project and decided that there had to be a better way to install solar. We came up with the revolutionary LightSpeed Mount Residential design after years of prototyping iterations and rooftop solar best practices.
What did you think of SOMO?
It was very impressive. The ability to talk to both installers and other manufacturers gives us a good idea of where we stand in the market and we are confident of the industry adoption for our new solution.
