PV racks for Africa

[Eric Youngren]

Right now in Africa they have local welders build custom racks for every array. They are decent quality and sometimes quite nicely painted. But they are not that cheap to the installers and they add a level of time delay and hassle to every system installation, and they are usually not built for the array to be expanded with room for additional modules.

In the future hopefully the local fabricators will be able to provide consistent quality racks, but for now I plan to supply an extruded aluminum or roll-formed pre-galvanized type rail system for PV array racking. I like the PowerRail by DPW PowerFab and the SolarMount standard rail from UniRac. I am also intrigued by some of the roll formed galvanized steel rails from Uni-Strut also.

I am leaning towards the PowerRail because I think it is higher quality approach for top-down mounting. But I have not done an apples-to-apples comparison on the materials costs. I will work on that..

For security hardware of the arrays I like the Penta Nuts

I would like to use the tallest L-feet possible to get the rails up as high off the roof as possible for good air flow around the panels. What other rail support options should we have? I like U-bolts to attach to pipes.