Sturdy and Sophisticated: The Benefits of Aluminum Structures
There are multiple benefits to choosing solar canopies for your next renewable energy installation project. A solar pergola, residential solar carport, or employee parking solar canopy offers a number of key advantages over traditional rooftop solar arrays.
Firstly, solar canopies elevate solar panels and equipment off the ground or rooftops, allowing project owners to maximize the usable space available to them. These canopies provide secure housing for panels, create solar shade, and serve as a barrier against environmental elements. This makes them ideal for use as protective carports for businesses and homes.
Contemporary solar canopy design options, with their sleek silhouettes and stylish finishes, can complement the aesthetic appeal of any space. They can also provide excellent ROI by ensuring property owners generate a consistent supply of clean, renewable solar energy.
Selecting a solar canopy made with the right materials is essential for ensuring great returns on your investment. Brooklyn Solar Canopy Co.’s A-Frame, Post-Truss, and Cantilever canopies are manufactured from high-quality aluminum for a sturdy, resilient, and attractive result.
Read on as we share the benefits of aluminum solar structures. We’ll also detail how they can support your next professional solar canopy installation.
Lightweight Durability
Our solar canopies are constructed from 6000 Series aluminum alloy, which is extruded domestically. This material is renowned for its exceptional strength and weather resistance, making it ideal for housing solar arrays.
While notably strong, our aluminum is also lightweight. This enables effortless transportation and staging during installations of all scopes and sizes. Its lightweight nature also effectively reduces the costs of shipping and logistics, further enhancing projects’ ROI.
This combination of lightness and durability is highly beneficial for supporting ideal climate performance across the United States. Our canopies are designed to maintain their strength and structural integrity under a wide range of climatic conditions. Depending on the type selected, they can handle wind loads of up to 200mph and snow loads up to 100psf. All our solar canopies are also designed to handle seismic conditions and events like earthquakes and tremors.
Significant Strength-to-Weight Ratio
Aluminum solar carports offer a high strength-to-weight ratio, making them a perfect choice for securing solar arrays of all sizes. While they are very lightweight by nature, they offer the strength and robustness of far heavier materials like steel at the same time.
This strength allows our canopies to house even large-scale commercial solar carport panel arrays securely, with minimal risk of damage, falling, or buckling. It also lets clients install extra features, such as solar canopy EV charging stations for electrified fleets, which can further increase ROI. Concurrently, these canopies can minimize the expenses of vehicle fuel and grid-based electric bills.
Reduced Foundation Costs
Steel solar carports and wood solar canopies may be strong, but they can also be very heavy. These types of canopies often cannot be fixed to existing structural walls, as they would exert too high a load on the walls and risk impairing a building’s structural integrity.
To mitigate this risk, these canopies would need to be free-standing. However, free-standing canopies require extensive foundations and numerous structural posts. These extra materials and large foundations can add vast sums to installation expenses, as can the need for heavy machinery, lifting equipment, and additional labor.
Our aluminum solar pergolas provide a functional alternative. They provide a similar degree of strength and permanence, but because they are so lightweight, they have reduced foundational and material requirements and less labor for installation. These factors help ensure that projects of all sizes are financially viable for clients. Aluminum solar pergolas also speed up installation processes and provide a similar, resilient result to steel canopies without the associated expenses of the latter.
No Additional Finishes Required
Brooklyn Solar Canopy Co.’s solar carports are delivered in a standard aluminum mill finish. If you wish to customize your pergola, we offer black or white powder-coating at an additional cost.
While powder coating can offer a uniquely stylish look, it is an optional extra. Our canopies do not require any additional coatings or finishes to keep them looking and performing at their best. Milled aluminum is inherently weather-resistant and corrosion-resistant, ensuring that even our standard canopies will maintain their structural and aesthetic integrity in all settings and locations.
Recyclable Structure Materials
BSCC’s aluminum solar canopies carry a 30-year warranty on equipment, ensuring a long lifespan for your projects. With this said, all canopies have a limited lifespan. At the end of it, clients may wish to dismantle their canopies or move them off site as they see fit.
Another advantage of solar carports is their recyclability. Aluminum is a solid choice for installers and clients who aim to maintain sustainable operations. This material is fully recyclable and simple to dismantle, and companies that recycle aluminum are easy to locate in the US.
Investing in an aluminum solar carport can help you contribute to a sustainable, circular economy. Once your canopy has served its purpose and needs to be replaced, it can be recycled without any degradation of its material quality, allowing it to be turned into a new solar pergola or other products and materials.
Considering that recycling aluminum takes as little as 5% of the energy and resources needed to produce new aluminum, this is an important consideration for long-term environmental protection.
Simple to Move On Site
Aluminum solar canopies need to be installed by professional installers at the project site. Thanks to our prefabricated canopies, this process is straightforward, but it may require installation teams to move the canopy structure around the site to find the ideal location for the canopy and solar panels.
Our light and durable canopies are simple to move on and around project sites, even for small installation teams. This simplifies the process of finding the best area on each site where the solar panels will gain as much sun exposure as possible. Once the canopy is positioned optimally, clients can be assured that their solar arrays will generate consistent, clean power to meet all their needs.
Minimal Reliance on Heavy Machinery During Installation
Some rooftop solar alternatives, especially those made from heavyweight materials like steel, require heavy machinery and cranes to be lifted onto project sites and rooftops. Our aluminum canopies, however, reduce the need for heavy machines during installation.
Each of our canopies’ primary components, including their rail, truss, and leg assemblies, is divided into multiple, separate components. Made from light aluminum alloy, these components are easy to transport and lift using a rope and pulley system, or a ladder for A-frame rooftop designs.
This minimal need for heavy machines can considerably reduce the cost of solar carport installations. It also allows canopies to be installed and set up in a matter of weeks or days, allowing clients to electrify their homes or commercial operations as quickly as possible.
Meet Your Solar Canopy Needs with BSCC
Brooklyn Solar Canopy Co.’s canopies are manufactured from tough aluminum alloy, bringing you all the benefits of this robust and versatile material. Our lightweight structures simplify the installation process and minimize costs while providing long-wearing housing for solar equipment at every scale.
Additionally, our standard aluminum mill finish canopies are cost-effective, durable, recyclable, and aesthetically pleasing, benefiting clients’ budgets, property aesthetics, and the planet.
Contact our team of experts today to get a quote for a solar canopy that meets your needs and discover the benefits of aluminum solar structures for yourself.