The Convergence of the Roofing and Solar Industries

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Tell us a little bit about CertainTeed and your position with the organization.

CertainTeed®, headquartered in Malvern, Pennsylvania, has helped form the building merchandise industry for extra than 110 years. Founded in 1904 as General Roofing Manufacturing Company, the organization receives its call, CertainTeed, from its unique slogan, “Quality Made Certain, Satisfaction Guaranteed.” Today, CertainTeed is a leading North American logo of outdoors and indoors building merchandise, including roofing, siding, fence, decking, railing, trim, insulation, drywall, ceilings, and sun.

CertainTeed is a subsidiary of Saint-Gobain®, one of the international’s largest and oldest building products corporations. It has 6,900 employees and greater than 60 manufacturing facilities at some stage in the USA and Canada. CertainTeed had approximately $four billion overall sales in 2018. As Product Manager, I serve in both an R&D and marketing function, chargeable for new product improvement activities and the commercialization of CertainTeed’s sun products.

The Convergence of the Roofing and Solar Industries 1

Recently we have seen more big roofing companies grow to be more involved in the sun. Why do you observe this is?

First, there’s the essential recognition that residential solar can be a sizeable part of electricity’s destiny. Building from there, there’s a natural alignment and synergy among sun and roofing for the value chain’s duration, which is organically pulling the 2 industries collectively. As the sun industry matures, merchandise is getting less difficult to install, and software has simplified the gadget layout and income technique, both of which have enabled greater roofing contractors to take part within the sun marketplace. At the equal time, we see solar installers, particularly in extra advanced solar markets, adopting roofing. I suppose there’s also the belief that as solar expenses come down, there’s a greater possibility for a sun roofing product to achieve success. Add all this up, and it makes sense for roofing businesses to get involved in the sun in some manner, shape, or form.

Does it make feel for a new roof and solar to be mounted at the identical time by using the equal contractor?

It makes perfect sense. Since sun products are usually warranted for 25 years, the quality time to install solar in a while, or as soon after as viable, a new roof is hooked up. From the patron’s attitude, finding one contractor who can installation each roof and sun simplify their shopping experience. Note that I’m defining “purchasing enjoy” to increase from setting up through the roofing and solar systems’ service life because if there are any issues down the road, there’s no finger-pointing among two contractors. Better but, if each of the roofing and solar structures is furnished and warranted with the aid of a single manufacturer and hooked up by way of an unmarried contractor, there’s even greater value to the client. And from an installer’s perspective, promoting two merchandise rather than one now improves the generation of their sales. It affects price efficiencies, which they can use to enhance their profitability and pass along to the consumer. In this scenario, everybody wins.

What are the blessings and disadvantages of installing sun and roofing collectively?

The blessings of putting in sun and roofing collectively are better assurance protections, greater constant supply chains, product innovation, greater inexpensive pricing, and more client satisfaction. The handiest downside is that because roofing contractors and sun installers have worked in distinct silos for seeing you later, there may be gaining knowledge of curve in terms of knowledge each product itself and the sales and set up the method for each. The purchaser expects whoever they talk to approximately their home challenge to be knowledgeable about and ready in all of the products being hooked up.

We are in the early stages of solar roofing material, such as solar shingles. How do you see this gambling out for roofers and solar installers?

Solar roofing merchandise has without a doubt been around for many years, and whilst beyond forecasts have proven them becoming a sizeable share of the sun product marketplace, that hasn’t materialized for some of the motives. With the movement that we’ve seen inside the trades coming together, one of the obstacles to wider adoption of sun roofing merchandise is disappearing. There’s sincerely a client hobby in sun roofing, and contractors who’ve each solar and roofing talents are nice positioned to capitalize on this hobby. Even even though the attention to solar roofing has elevated appreciably inside the last few years, it’s going to take greater hard paintings, innovation, and time for it to grow to be a widespread part of the solar marketplace. With that said, I wouldn’t ignore sun roofing proper now – there’s masses of possibility obtainable within the modern state of affairs.