ROOF REFURBISHMENT
anything else. Monitoring that raises an alert to a named person rather than to a dashboard nobody opens. And on a healthcare site, a conversation with the fire safety adviser at design stage rather than at handover. None of that is exotic. It is the sort of detail that quietly decides how well a system performs across its life.
Solar is not fit and forget The related point, and the one I would push hardest on, is what happens after handover. I have inspected systems where an inverter fault light
Engineer installing solar array.
Then geometry and orientation, which on a hospital
is rarely the clean rectangle it is on a distribution centre. Roofs are broken up by plant, lift overruns, flues, extract, rooflights, and access routes, and every one of those casts a shadow at some point in the day. Shading does not just cost you the shaded panels. Depending on how the strings are arranged, it costs you the performance of everything on that string, which is why string layout should be designed around the plant rather than drawn over it. Then the cable routes. Getting DC cabling from
the array to the plant room in a live hospital, without compromising fire compartmentation and without disruptive containment through clinical areas, is often the constraint that decides where the inverters go. And then access again, but this time in year 10, for cleaning, inspection, thermographic survey, and replacing whatever has failed. If the maintenance route was never designed, the maintenance does not happen. I have seen that outcome more often than I would like. Some roofs take a full array. Some take a fraction of
what the first estimate suggested. Better to know at survey stage than at design stage, and much better than at installation stage.
Leon Shead
Leon Shead is head of Langley Renewables. He began his career as an electrician and spent a decade at Mears, latterly as national technical project manager running solar PV and energy efficiency programmes across the company’s national branch network. He has delivered installations across healthcare, education, agriculture, commercial, and residential sites, and joined Langley in October 2024 to lead its solar and renewables division.
The part of a solar installation most likely to shape its safety record Fire risk is the question estates teams and their fire safety advisers ask about solar, and it deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance. The research gives a reasonable picture of where the risk tends to sit. The BRE National Solar Centre’s work for what was then BEIS looked at UK incidents where a PV system was the likely origin, and found the recurring themes related to installation quality and component selection rather than to the technology itself. DC isolators were the single largest identified category, with DC connectors close behind. Connectors that were not fully seated, incorrect crimping, moisture ingress at connections, and in some cases, AC-rated components used in DC circuits. What that suggests in practice is that a good deal of
an array’s fire performance is settled during a few hours of workmanship, on connections that will then sit on a roof, unopened, for 25 years. It is difficult to inspect into a system afterwards. Better to build it in and evidence it at the time. So the things worth writing into a specification are
the unglamorous ones. Documented commissioning with test results retained rather than filed and lost. A defined isolation strategy, with clear labelling and a plan the fire service can follow on arrival. Thermographic inspection as part of the maintenance regime, because a developing connection fault shows as heat long before it shows as
106 Health Estate Journal October 2026
had been on for years, and nobody on site knew what it meant, because the paperwork went with a member of staff who left and the support number on the unit no longer connected to anyone. I have seen arrays so covered in moss that the shading created hot spots. In both cases the equipment was fine. The maintenance regime was not. So an annual inspection, working monitoring with someone actually watching the alerts, and a named point of contact who will still exist in 10 years are worth as much in a business case as the yield figure. They are also easy to ask for at specification stage and almost impossible to retrofit into a contract afterwards.
Ask about the guarantee before you need it One more procurement question is worth asking early, because the alternative is asking it in an emergency. Contractors do sometimes fail, and construction sees more insolvencies than any other sector in the UK. If it happens partway through a job, three things are immediately exposed. Who completes the works. Who stands behind the guarantee on the part already installed. And whether the guarantee survives the change of contractor at all. That is exactly what was tested at Addenbrooke’s, and the answer held because of where the guarantee sat. There is a related version of the same question between
trades. If the waterproofing is guaranteed by one party and the array by another, the gap between them is where a penetration dispute lands, and it lands at the worst possible moment, which is when there is water inside the building and both parties have a plausible case. So the questions to put to any supplier are the same,
whoever they are. Who issues the guarantee? Is it backed by a third-party insurer, and can you see the policy rather than a summary of it. What happens to it if the installing contractor ceases to trade? Is it transferable if the building changes hands or the Trust reconfigures? And does it cover the complete system, including insulation, details, and anything fixed through the waterproofing, or the waterproofing layer alone Have you also asked whether the supplier is a CCPI Signatory and whether the installer is TrustMark registered? None of those are difficult questions. They are all a great deal cheaper to ask at tender than to answer in year four.
Buy the access once None of this is complicated or new. It is mostly a question of the order things are done in. Survey the estate. Grade every roof on condition and remaining life. Rank by condition rather than convenience. Sequence against the capital you can realistically see over five years rather than the capital you hope for. And every time you get onto a roof, do all three jobs: waterproofing, thermal performance, and generation. That is what a roof asset strategy is. Not a document on
a shared drive. The discipline of only buying the access once.
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