The equipment doesn’t have moving parts so I wouldn’t expect it to break down so quickly.

The real surprise for me was how much having solar panels on your roof adds to the cost of roofing work. Which is a problem because the roof is likely to need repairs more often than the solar panels.

Yeah it's a tradeoff on the roof. The panels also increase the lifetime of the roof.

Solar panels are incredibly durable, there's a thriving secondary market for used panels, and we're likely to see 30-50 years of usage out of any panel created today.

Cracking the problem of making the roof out of solar panels seems like a fantastic engineering challenge. But not one with small tiles, make the roof out of the bigger cheap large panels. I would love to see startups working on that. Asphalt roofs look like crap anyway, changing to shiny panels would be a huge improvement IMHO

What breaks in 11 years? Solar panels and batteries both last longer than that.

As for your other point of becoming obsolete, why care about chasing latest fads for home appliances.

Are you sure? Lots of people are telling me that batteries only last 4-5 years tops and solar panels usually burn out before 10 years /s

I particularly love when they are telling me that my 11 year old Prius' batteries will only last 5 years before they are junk.

This is totally wrong. I work in the industry. Solar panels should last for 30 years, but they degrade in capacity by 0.5 to 1% per year, depending on environmental conditions (temp, radiation, etc). Lithium batteries from tier 1 suppliers can last at least a decade of regular use. It depends on how their cycling and state of charge is managed. If you keep them between 20% and 80% charge, they can last incredibly long.

/s is the sarcasm tag.

> Except that after 11 years the equipment will have broken down or be obsolete, at which point you have to start over.

If my calculations are correct, that setup probably lasts at least 30 years. This is not a cell phone battery and panels do not degrade that fast.