The walkthrough before you invoice was about the last ten minutes of a job: showing the customer the finished work before the number lands. This one is the opposite end of a job, and a stranger one. It is the walk you do before someone else's work goes on top of the roof and stays there for twenty-five years.
A homeowner in a subdivision we have roofed a lot of signed with a solar company. The panels were going up in three weeks. She called us, not because anything was wrong, but because a neighbor had told her that once the array was on, nobody would see that roof again until the panels came off. She was right. Before the solar panels go on is the last time anybody gets a clear look at the shingles, the penetrations and the flashing underneath, and it is worth twenty minutes on a live link with her watching.
Why a roof under an array is different
An ordinary roof gets looked at. Every few years somebody goes up, after a storm somebody goes up, when the gutter crew is there somebody glances around. Small things get noticed while they are small.
A roof under a solar array does not get looked at. The panels sit a few inches off the shingles on rails, and the part of the roof that matters most is the part you cannot see from the ladder or the ground. The racking adds its own penetrations, dozens of them, lag bolted into rafters through the shingles. A shingle roof with eight years left and a twenty-five year array on top of it is a problem with a date on it, and the conversation about that date is easier when it happens now.
So the point of the walk is simple. Put the condition of the roof, on the day before the install, on a record the homeowner watched being made.
What to show before the solar panels go on
I walk it in our normal order, but I linger on the footprint. The installer's plan shows where the array goes. I stand in that rectangle and narrate it like the homeowner is going to have to remember it later, because she is.
- Shingle condition inside the footprint. Granule loss, cupping, cracked tabs, exposed nail heads. I say the age of the roof if I know it and what that wear is normal for. If it is fine, I say it is fine, slope by slope.
- Every penetration inside and near the footprint. Pipe boots, the bath fan cap, any old satellite mount. The penetrations are where it leaks applies double here, because these are the ones nobody will be able to reach.
- Flashing at anything the array runs up to. Chimney, sidewall, the step flashing along a dormer. If the array stops a foot short of a chimney, that foot is where water and debris will collect for two decades.
- Valleys and the ridge. Whether the array crosses them, and their condition if so.
- The attic side. Decking, rafter spacing where the racking will land, any existing stains under the footprint, daylight at penetrations. If the roof is going to get lag bolted, the underside is half the story.
I take full resolution stills at each of those during the walk, and they stay attached to the inspection alongside the recording.
Who watches
The homeowner, from the kitchen or from work. That is the person this is for.
The solar installer's project lead, if they will take the link. On the one I am describing, he did, from his truck at another job. He saw the same roof I saw and flagged one frame, a spot near the ridge where a rail was going to land on a patched section. The install plan moved eighteen inches. That is a decision made in five minutes that would otherwise have been made on the day, with a crew standing on the roof and the panels on the lawn.
If you are the installer rather than the roofer, the same walk works with the roles reversed. Put the homeowner and the roofer who did the last job on the link. Five people can watch one inspection at once, which is enough for everyone with an opinion about that roof.
The viewer side is watch only. Nobody on the link can talk to you on the roof. Questions land as flagged frames with a short note, and the voice conversation happens by phone after you are down.
The record has to outlast the plan
Here is the honest limit. The array is up there for twenty-five years. Recordings in the dashboard are kept for 90 days on Solo, a year on Crew, three years on Company. Nothing we sell keeps a recording for the life of a solar array, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
So on this walk, the recording is not the final home for the record. It is the thing you make the record from. Pull the recording and the stills down before retention ends, and put them wherever this homeowner's file is going to live for a long time. Getting your inspection records out covers how. Give the homeowner a copy too. In year twelve, when there is a stain on the bedroom ceiling and three trades pointing at each other, what she has is a dated walk of that roof, narrated, from before any of them touched it.
When the answer is do not install yet
Sometimes the walk says the roof should be replaced first. Cupped shingles across the footprint, or a penetration already leaking into the attic. That is an uncomfortable thing to tell a homeowner three weeks before an install she has already scheduled.
It is much easier to say it while she is watching you point at it. The condition is on her screen. She heard what you said about it as you said it. And if she decides to go ahead anyway, that is her decision to make, and the record shows what she knew when she made it.
This is one of the clearest cases on the list of live inspection use cases: a decision, and somebody who cannot see the thing. What the homeowner's end looks like, and why her phone never asks for camera permission, is on the how it works page.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.