Panels on a Shared Roof: Solar in a Claremont Condo or Townhome

In a detached house, the roof belongs to the person who owns the house. That single fact is doing an enormous amount of quiet work in every other discussion of residential solar, and it stops being true the moment the home is attached to something else.

In a condominium, an owner commonly owns the space within their unit while the building envelope, including the roof, is common area belonging to all owners collectively and managed by the association. Sometimes a portion is designated for the exclusive use of one unit. In a planned development, a townhome owner may own the lot and the structure on it outright, which is a materially different position.

Those are not variations on a theme. They are different property arrangements, and they lead to different answers about whether an owner can put anything on the roof at all.

Start with the documents, not the quote

The first document in a solar conversation about an attached home is not an installer's proposal. It is the governing documents: the declaration, the condominium plan or map, and the bylaws and rules.

Those establish the boundary between what an individual owns and what the association controls. Until that boundary is established, nobody can sensibly discuss where panels might go, who maintains what beneath them, or who is responsible if something leaks.

Read them, and where the language is ambiguous, get a reading from somebody qualified. Ambiguity about a roof boundary is the kind of thing that reads as a technicality until there is water inside a unit.

Protections exist, and they are not a blank check

California policy has long favored the use of solar energy, and there are statutory protections limiting the ability of associations and other parties to unreasonably restrict solar installations, with provisions addressed specifically to common interest developments including how roof space may be treated.

Two honest observations about that.

First, protection against UNREASONABLE restriction is not the same as a right to install anything anywhere. Associations retain the ability to impose reasonable conditions, and the boundary between reasonable and unreasonable is a legal question, not an opinion an installer is qualified to offer.

Second, this area of law has been amended over time. Anyone relying on it needs current advice about the current text, not a summary in a general article. An attorney familiar with common interest developments is the correct source, and the association's own counsel is the source the association will listen to.

The conditions that usually appear

Where an installation is permitted in an attached community, the association will typically want several things settled in writing, and these travel with the unit rather than with the person.

WHO MAINTAINS THE EQUIPMENT and who repairs the roof beneath it, which are two different obligations that have to be assigned explicitly.

WHO PAYS when the roof under the array reaches the end of its life and the equipment has to be removed and reinstalled. On a common roof replaced on the association's schedule, that is a foreseeable event and a foreseeable expense, and it should not be decided for the first time when the scaffolding arrives.

WHO IS LIABLE for damage attributable to the installation, and what insurance the installing owner must carry. The coverage side of that question is discussed in the insurance guide, and in an attached community it is usually the association that dictates the requirement.

WHAT HAPPENS ON A SALE, meaning whether the obligations bind a successor owner and whether the association's consent is required for anything.

The metering question

An attached community may have a single service for the building or individual services per unit, and that arrangement determines whether an installation can serve one household at all.

Some communities instead have a system owned or arranged at the association level, where the benefit flows through the association's own accounts and, indirectly, through the assessments owners pay. That is not the same as an owner having solar. It is the association having solar, and an owner buying into that community is buying into whatever obligations came with it.

Either way, the interconnection is a utility matter tied to a specific service, and the questions in the permission to operate guide apply the same way they do anywhere else, with the added complication that the utility account holder and the roof owner may not be the same party.

Buying an attached home that already has panels

The document request is bigger than usual, because it spans two files.

From the seller and the provider: the contract, the permits, the interconnection authorization and the production record, in the ordinary way described in the first questions guide.

From the association: the governing documents, the approval that was granted for this installation, any agreement the installing owner signed about maintenance, repair, removal or liability, and confirmation of whether those obligations pass to a successor.

An installation that was never approved is the finding to watch for. It is not necessarily fatal and it is emphatically not something to discover after closing, because the buyer inherits the position, not the seller.

The realistic summary

Solar on an attached home is a governance problem before it is an engineering problem. The panels are the easy part.

Anyone considering it should read the governing documents, ask the association what its process is, and get legal advice about the protections and their limits before spending money on a design. Anyone buying a unit that already has panels should treat the association file as being just as important as the solar file, because that is where the obligations live.

For the wider map, return to the solar guide. Ownership boundaries and approval requirements belong with the association and its governing documents, statutory questions belong with a qualified attorney, and interconnection belongs with the utility. Anthony Grynchal has been licensed in California since November 2009.