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Solar comes off before the old roof comes off, and it goes back when the new roof is ready to hold the rails. The electrician and the roofer are two bookings with one order. Reversing that order strands panels on a roof that is about to be demolished, or leaves a finished roof with no plan for the holes. Roof Revival Melbourne writes the sequence. We do not wire the system.
A re-roof with panels still bolted through the old sheets is a demolition of two systems at once. The rails are fixed to the roof you are throwing away. The cables are live until someone qualified shuts them down. The only calm version is a list: electrician isolates and removes the array, the roof is replaced, the new penetrations are detailed for the array that is returning, the electrician reinstalls. Anything sold as “we’ll work around the panels” is a promise to leave the bays under the rails until they leak, or to disturb live gear.
This is trade order. It is not a guide to stringing panels, and it is not a guide to inverters, isolators, or meter boards. If a sentence here starts sounding like electrical instruction, ignore the sentence and book the electrician.
Rails and feet land on the surface that has to come off. Leaving them up means the crew cannot strip those bays, or strips around them and creates a seam of old roof inside a new one. That seam is the leak of year two. Taking the feet off without an isolation is how a roofing crew ends up in an electrical job it does not hold. So the array leaves first, as a whole, under the trade that owns it.
Storage is part of the order. Panels need a place that is not the drop zone and not the garden bed you are protecting. On a small block that place may be off site. Decide it before removal day. A stack of glass in the hallway is how a re-roof becomes a glazier’s job as well.
The roof job in the middle is roof replacement in Melbourne. The days on the roof sit between the two electrical visits. If you book the roof first and the electrician “sometime in the month”, the roof crew arrives to a live array and the month slips.
The new roof should be detailed for the feet that are coming back. Old penetrations are not a template if the old penetrations were the leak. Tell the roofer the array is returning, how many rails, and which face. We can then place valleys, flashings, and sheet laps so the reinstall is not punching a new hole through a brand new apron. Discovering the solar plan at reinstall is how flashings get improvised.
Sometimes the reinstall is not like-for-like. The system is old, the inverter is being replaced, or the household is adding panels. That is an electrical design. It changes the layout we flash around. Get that decision made before the new roof is fixed, not after. We will not guess a future array and we will not leave a field of spare holes “just in case”.
Tile roofs and metal roofs hand the electrician a different surface. The sequence does not change. The brackets do. Whoever is putting the panels back needs to know which roof they will meet. Put the roof specification in their hands when they quote the removal, so the reinstall quote is for the future roof, not the one in the bin.
Removal, roof, reinstall. Three dates. Weather can move the middle date, so the reinstall should not be locked to the same afternoon as the last screw with no slack. A day’s gap is cheaper than a crew standing under a damp roof pretending to be finished. It is also cheaper than panels going back onto a roof that still needs a valley.
During the gap the house is without that generation. Tell the household. Hot water and bills survive a week. A business that was counting on the array for a process needs a longer conversation, and maybe a different program. Say it before you are surprised.
If the roof inspection finds the roof can stay, do not remove the solar “while you’re here” and invent a re-roof. Sequence is for the job you are actually doing. A repair around one bracket is a smaller, different booking. The signs the roof is finished are what justify the full sequence. A dull coating does not.
You should not be the messenger between two trades who have never seen each other’s notes. Copy both into the same email with the three dates and the roof type. Ask the electrician what they need from the roof at reinstall. Ask us what we need from them at removal. The leftover questions are usually about feet and flashings, not about whose ute arrives first.
At the end, the roof handover and the solar handover are separate. Our photos show the new roof and the penetrations we made. Their photos show the system they reinstalled. You want both. A single smiling array photo does not document the flashing underneath it.
Send suburb, storeys and two roof photos. Roof Revival Melbourne — 0426 516 883 · info@roofrevivalmelbourne.com.au
