- Jan 20, 2012
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- If you're a qualified, trainee, or retired electrician - Which country is it that your work will be / is / was aimed at?
- United Kingdom
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- Solar installer for 15 years
- Business Name
- Leeds Solar
*previously in this saga... We're in the process of changing from Schuco to Schletter mounting kit because our supplier convinced us it was just as good and would save us a fair amount of money*
So we're now doing our first schletter installs, and I don't know if it's just a case of 'fearing change' or not, but I'm finding all sorts of problems with the kit, which seems to be a lot less forgiving of none standard roofs than the schuco kit.
Problems I've found so far are
1 - The module clips need to have the rails at almost exactly 90deg to the edge of the panels due to the way they clip into the rails, whereas Shuco could be at virtually any angle. We're currently doing an old house where the rafters seem to be running at around 75 deg angle to the panels, and it looks like I might have to end up starting again and running it all in cruciform just to get the rails straight so I can get the clips in position. This wouldn't previously have been a problem because we always had spare rails and cruciform kit in stock, but now we have nothing other than the exact kit we ordered for this job, so will have to delay for a couple of days to get the cruciform kit delivered, and doing it cruciform will make it more expensive than if we'd used schuco.
2 - the ECO rails are a lot more flexible than the cheapest schuco rails we used, so I think we'll realistically have to be using the more expensive solo rails most of the time, so there's not going to be much in the way of savings going on there either - actually they cost more than the BP130 rails from schuco.
3 - the rails are in exact 4 or 6m lengths, so if you're doing 6 x 1m wide panels you can't just use a single length of rail as you can with the schuco rails that are actually 6.18m long.
4 - The brackets that have vertical adjustment for the tile height as well as for the rail height to get the rails level are actually more expensive than the schuco brackets that do the same thing.
5 - when using hanger bolts, the entire height adjustment for the rails is done via the actual height on the bolt, and there's less scope for side to side adjustment to allow for the hanger bolts not being entirely in line with each other.
6 - The end clips for the panels for some reason are double width clips, so will be a lot more visibly stuck out from the end of the panels than with the more discreet schuco clips.
mark me down in the unimpressed column so far.
It is true that if you don't care at all about being able to level the rails up properly, or ensuring the bracket is the correct distance from the tiles, or that you're using a much more flexible rail etc that you can probably save money with these system, but if you do care about any of that, then it looks like schuco is actually the better and cheaper option.
So we're now doing our first schletter installs, and I don't know if it's just a case of 'fearing change' or not, but I'm finding all sorts of problems with the kit, which seems to be a lot less forgiving of none standard roofs than the schuco kit.
Problems I've found so far are
1 - The module clips need to have the rails at almost exactly 90deg to the edge of the panels due to the way they clip into the rails, whereas Shuco could be at virtually any angle. We're currently doing an old house where the rafters seem to be running at around 75 deg angle to the panels, and it looks like I might have to end up starting again and running it all in cruciform just to get the rails straight so I can get the clips in position. This wouldn't previously have been a problem because we always had spare rails and cruciform kit in stock, but now we have nothing other than the exact kit we ordered for this job, so will have to delay for a couple of days to get the cruciform kit delivered, and doing it cruciform will make it more expensive than if we'd used schuco.
2 - the ECO rails are a lot more flexible than the cheapest schuco rails we used, so I think we'll realistically have to be using the more expensive solo rails most of the time, so there's not going to be much in the way of savings going on there either - actually they cost more than the BP130 rails from schuco.
3 - the rails are in exact 4 or 6m lengths, so if you're doing 6 x 1m wide panels you can't just use a single length of rail as you can with the schuco rails that are actually 6.18m long.
4 - The brackets that have vertical adjustment for the tile height as well as for the rail height to get the rails level are actually more expensive than the schuco brackets that do the same thing.
5 - when using hanger bolts, the entire height adjustment for the rails is done via the actual height on the bolt, and there's less scope for side to side adjustment to allow for the hanger bolts not being entirely in line with each other.
6 - The end clips for the panels for some reason are double width clips, so will be a lot more visibly stuck out from the end of the panels than with the more discreet schuco clips.
mark me down in the unimpressed column so far.
It is true that if you don't care at all about being able to level the rails up properly, or ensuring the bracket is the correct distance from the tiles, or that you're using a much more flexible rail etc that you can probably save money with these system, but if you do care about any of that, then it looks like schuco is actually the better and cheaper option.
