Solar panel installation in Alicante

Most of Alicante lives in apartment blocks, and the roofs those blocks have are flat, communal, and often already occupied by other equipment.

That makes the roof itself the first question here, well before panel count.

What kind of roof you have, and what it means for mounting

The pitched tile roof that dominates solar marketing is not what most Alicante properties have. In the city the typical roof is a flat terrace, and mounting on one is a completely different job from hooking onto rafters under tiles.

On a flat roof, panels go on frames set at a tilt to catch the sun properly, and those frames are either ballasted with weight or mechanically fixed. Ballasting avoids penetrating the waterproofing, which is a real advantage on a roof whose membrane you do not want to disturb, but it adds significant weight that the structure has to be able to take. Mechanical fixing is lighter but every fixing is a penetration that has to be sealed properly, and a badly sealed one is a leak that appears in the first heavy autumn rain.

The second flat-roof issue is spacing. Tilted rows shade the row behind them when the sun is low, so rows have to be spaced apart, and that spacing consumes roof area fast. A flat roof therefore fits noticeably fewer panels than its square metres suggest, and anyone quoting a system size from an aerial photograph without accounting for row spacing is overstating what will fit.

The third, specific to apartment blocks, is that the roof is usually communal even where the flat is yours. That turns a technical question into a community one, and it is worth resolving before spending anything on design.