Answers
About Solar in Nashville

In most of Metro Nashville, if your shingle roof is pushing 18–25 years or already has patches and curling, it’s usually smarter to address the roof before loading it up with solar. Panels are designed to last 25+ years; you don’t want to pay to remove and reinstall them halfway through because the roof finally gave up. During a site visit in Donelson, Hermitage, Madison, or Antioch, we look at shingle age, granule loss, soft spots in the deck, and any history of leaks.

Because we are The Metal Roofers and The Solar Roofers under one roof, we can evaluate structure, decking, and roofing at the same time we design your solar and battery system. If you need a new roof, we can price roof and solar together, time the projects so they happen in the right order, and make sure your new roof is built with solar in mind. On existing metal roofs in Franklin, Mt. Juliet, or Gallatin, the conversation is different, properly installed standing seam or metal shingles often have plenty of life left, so solar can go on without major roof work. The goal is simple: line up the lifespan of your roof and your solar so you get one long, clean run without avoidable rework.

For most Nashville homes in good structural condition, solar is well within normal roof loading. Panels, racking, and hardware usually add a load similar to a second layer of shingles, not a rooftop parking lot. The concern in older East Nashville, Sylvan Park, Inglewood, or Madison homes is the structure under the roof: rafter size, spacing, spans, past water damage, and any “creative” framing added over the decades.

Because we’re roof specialists as well as solar installers, we look at your attic framing and decking the way a roofer does first, then layer solar design on top of that. If we see undersized rafters, heavy sagging, or rotted decking, we’ll talk about reinforcement or roof work before we hang anything. On newer construction in places like Nolensville, Mt. Juliet, and many Franklin subdivisions, framing is often straightforward, but we still verify before we submit to NES, MTE, or your co-op. Our job is to hand you a stamped, code-compliant system where the roof structure and the solar loading have both been thought through.

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Daytime-heavy use is exactly where commercial solar tends to pencil out here. Offices in Green Hills, boutiques in 12 South, churches in Madison, and shops in Franklin or Mt. Juliet usually run their biggest loads, lighting, computers, refrigeration, HVAC, during business hours when the sun is available. Because we don’t have classic 1:1 net metering under TVA, it’s valuable when most of that solar power is consumed on-site instead of exported.

As The Metal Roofers and The Solar Roofers, we look at your roof and your bills together. On many older commercial roofs in Nashville and surrounding areas, it makes sense to address the roof membrane or metal before we bolt 25 years of solar on top. For businesses in La Vergne, Lebanon, or Smyrna, we also pay attention to demand charges and how solar (plus optional batteries) can help shave peaks. Then we layer incentives: 30% ITC, MACRS depreciation, and possible USDA REAP support for rural facilities. The result is a roof-and-solar plan that’s built around your actual NES or MTE usage profile, not a generic “payback slide” pulled from another region.

Everything starts with the property and your real power history. For a Bellevue or Mt. Juliet home, we pull at least 12 months of NES, MTE, or co-op usage data, not just one bill. We pair that with high-resolution aerial imagery, on-site roof measurements, shade readings, and a roof inspection from our metal roofing team. The roof condition, ventilation, and material, shingles, standing seam, classic panel, or metal shingles, feed directly into the solar layout.

In older, tree-lined streets in Inglewood, East Nashville, or Sylvan Park, we may reject roof planes that look “big” but are badly shaded part of the year. On more open lots in Franklin, Nolensville, or Gallatin, we can often choose between several good roof sections and favor the one that balances performance and appearance. For batteries, we map your critical loads panel, look at NES/MTE outage history on your area, and size storage around how you actually want to ride through storms and ice. Our advantage is that you’re not trying to coordinate a roofer and a solar company on your own, we design the roof, solar, and backup as one system.

Modern solar panels are tested for wind, snow, and hail to international standards, and Middle Tennessee is comfortably inside those design limits when systems are engineered and attached correctly. In areas like Bellevue, Bordeaux, and North Nashville that have seen storm damage, we pay close attention to rail spans, attachment spacing, and edge clearances so arrays can handle the gusts that come with spring thunderstorms and fall fronts.

As The Metal Roofers, we already build roofs to live in this climate, high wind, sideways rain, and the occasional hailstorm. We extend that standard to solar by anchoring into structure, using hardware rated for local loads, and coordinating with the roof type so panels and mounting don’t create weak points. For hail, panels are rated to withstand impacts from hailstones of specified size and velocity; often the roof covering around them shows more cosmetic damage than the glass. In a direct hit from a tornado or extreme straight-line winds, everything becomes an insurance claim, roof, panels, siding, windows. Because we installed both the roof and the solar, we can document the system for your carrier and help you rebuild in a way that keeps the two working together.

In and around Nashville, buyers are getting more comfortable with solar, especially in Franklin, Brentwood, Green Hills, and established neighborhoods like East Nashville or Sylvan Park. When the system is owned (not leased), it usually transfers with the property as an improvement, similar to a metal roof upgrade, finished basement, or pool.

Where we help is in documentation. You’ll have clear paperwork on both the roof and the solar: roofing materials, underlayment, metal or shingle specs, plus panel, inverter, and battery details, warranties, and monitoring access. We can provide a simple summary for your agent that shows typical NES or MTE bills before and after solar, the age of the roof, and expected remaining life on both. During the sale, handing off the monitoring app and our contact info to the buyer is straightforward. If the buyer wants a system walkthrough or a checkup, you’re sending them back to the same company that built the roof and the solar, not into a customer service maze.

Some lots simply aren’t great solar candidates without cutting down trees that matter to you. When we come out to a heavily shaded property in East Nashville, Inglewood, Goodlettsville, or parts of Bellevue, we look at the whole picture: roof orientation and condition, tree species, growth patterns, and available open ground. Because we handle both roofing and solar, we’re not trying to force an array onto a roof just to close a sale.

If we can find good “solar acreage” on a detached garage, workshop, or barn roof, we’ll evaluate that structure and its roof the same way we do a main house and, if necessary, upgrade the roof before adding panels. In some cases, a ground mount in a sunnier corner of the lot or a solar carport over a driveway makes more sense, subject to zoning, setbacks, and HOA rules. And if the property truly has no good option for solar, we’ll say so and often recommend starting with roof, insulation, and HVAC efficiency upgrades that play well with TVA EnergyRight programs. The point is honest engineering: sometimes the best service we can provide is a clear “no” on rooftop solar and a better plan for your specific Nashville property.

For a typical single-family home in Metro Nashville, a straightforward solar-only system often lands somewhere in the mid–tens of thousands before incentives, depending on size, roof complexity, and equipment. Recent cost guides put a 5 kW system in Nashville around $14–20k after the 30% federal tax credit, with larger 8–12 kW systems scaling up from there.  Batteries are a separate line item: a single whole-home battery (Tesla, Enphase, FranklinWH, etc.) commonly adds $10–15k per unit installed, and many homes that want serious backup end up in the one- to three-battery range. The good news is that batteries and solar both qualify for the 30% federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC) when installed together, which takes a meaningful bite out of the total.

On the bill side, the reduction depends on your usage, roof orientation, shading, and which utility serves you. A lot of Nashville homes that size their systems properly see 20–60% annual kWh offset from solar, with the higher numbers typically on larger, sunnier, more south- and west-facing roofs in areas like Green Hills, Bellevue, Franklin, or Mt. Juliet. If you spend $150–$300+ per month on power, you’re not going to “zero out” the NES bill under current rules, but you can carve a big portion off your yearly usage and blunt the impact of future rate increases. Batteries don’t lower the bill much by themselves; their main job in Nashville is backup when the grid goes down. The right way to think about cost is: solar is a long-horizon bill-reduction project, and batteries are an outage-protection project that may pay you back in comfort rather than dollars-only math.

For most Nashville homeowners, you don’t have to do anything. Normal roof repairs here are treated as maintenance, and if a full replacement or larger project ever needs paperwork, we handle it directly with Metro Codes so you are not stuck in a permit line or emailing the city. Once you approve the proposal, we give you a realistic start window and a clear install plan, This is where it gets very “Tennessee.” There is no statewide net metering policy here, and TVA has retired its old Green Power Providers retail buyback program.  Instead, Nashville Electric Service (NES) and other local power companies operate under TVA rules and their own programs. NES currently offers NESolar Connect and NESolar Savings, which are structured programs for customers who want to sell eligible excess solar generation back to NES under specific terms and capacity caps.  These programs are not classic “1-for-1 net metering” like you see in some other states; they’re more like net billing or buyback arrangements where the export rate and program size are limited.

Middle Tennessee Electric (MTE) takes a slightly different approach and emphasizes education and right-sizing over aggressive net-metering promises. MTE’s own materials are very clear: there is no traditional net metering in their territory, but they do support interconnection and walk members through how solar will really perform on their system.  Bottom line for Nashville-area homeowners: you can absolutely connect solar to NES or MTE, but you should think of your system primarily as a way to offset your own use and hedge against rising rates, not as a money-printing machine selling lots of power back to the grid at full retail. A good local installer will design and explain your system around those specific NES, MTE, or co-op rules, not around generic “net metering” slides pulled from another state.

In a lot of Nashville, Brentwood, and Franklin neighborhoods, HOAs do approve standing seam metal roofs and metal shingles as long as the roof looks quiet and matches the guidelines. During your estimate we look at your HOA rules, recommend HOA-friendly colors and low-glare standing seam profiles, and give you a simple submittal packet (spec sheets + photos of local projects) so your board can review a specific, Nashville-style metal.A home battery system in Nashville is essentially a silent, automatic backup generator that lives on your wall and works with your solar (and grid) to keep selected circuits powered when everyone else on the street goes dark. When the grid is up, the battery stays charged from your solar and/or the grid based on how it’s programmed. When NES, MTE, or your co-op power drops, the battery and inverter detect the outage in fractions of a second and open a transfer switch that isolates your backed-up circuits from the grid (so you don’t backfeed the lines). Then the battery begins feeding those circuits from stored energy.

What you can run depends on how much storage you install and how you use it. In a typical East Nashville or Donelson home, one well-sized battery might comfortably keep fridge and freezer, a set of lights and outlets, Wi-Fi, a gas furnace blower or smaller mini-split, and a few key plugs running for many hours, especially if solar can recharge it during the day. Two or more batteries can back up more circuits or extend runtime in bigger homes in Green Hills, Bellevue, or Franklin. The key is designing the backup panel carefully: you don’t want to discover during an ice storm that your battery is trying to run every load in the house. A good Nashville installer will walk you through “survival mode” versus “comfort mode,” size battery capacity and solar around that, and show you in advance what stays on and what stays off when power fails.

Yes, Nashville is a perfectly workable solar market as long as you design around reality instead of pretending we live in the desert. We get plenty of sun hours spread across the year, but it’s mixed with cloud cover, humidity, and tree shade, especially in older neighborhoods like East Nashville, Inglewood, Sylvan Park, and Green Hills. Panels still produce on cloudy days, just at a lower output, and the annual performance numbers we use already account for our local weather patterns.

The real limiter here is shade, not clouds. A house with a big oak sitting directly over the best roof plane is a different conversation than a house on a more open lot in Bellevue, Donelson, Hermitage, or Mt. Juliet. That’s why we come out, look at the house, and actually model shading instead of selling the same package to everyone. Sometimes the answer is “yes, solar will do fine here,” sometimes it’s “we need to trim or remove specific trees,” and sometimes it’s “this roof is too shaded, but a detached garage or ground mount might make sense.” The design has to follow the property, not force a system where it doesn’t belong.

For a serious system in Nashville, you should expect three layers of support: equipment warranties, workmanship warranties, and real monitoring. Major manufacturers (panels, inverters, batteries) typically offer 10–25 year product warranties and 20–25 year performance warranties on panels; the installer should back that with a written workmanship warranty that covers their labor and roof penetrations for a meaningful period. Anything short and vague on paper is a red flag.

On the monitoring side, you should have app or web access that shows at least solar production and battery status, and ideally some view of your consumption as well. If something fails, a panel, an optimizer, an inverter, or a battery,the installer should be your first call, not a national 800 number. You want a Nashville-area company that can roll a truck to Antioch, Sylvan Park, Madison, Franklin, or Mt. Juliet when needed, not one that leaves you to fight through multiple layers of third-party service. During design, they should walk you through who to call for what (installer vs. manufacturer), what your first-year check-in looks like, and how they handle service tickets. In short: expect the same level of support you’d want from a heating and cooling company, not a one-time home improvement sale.

There are two timelines: paperwork and physical work. Paperwork (design, permit, utility approval) usually takes longer than the install itself. In Metro Nashville, once we have your roof measured and system designed, permits and interconnection approvals can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to over a month depending on NES, MTE, or your co-op’s load and the city’s permit queue. We handle that part, but it’s part of the reality here.

The physical install on a typical single-family home is usually measured in days, not weeks. For many rooftop solar-only jobs in Nashville, crews are on site 1–3 days. Add batteries and main panel work and you might be looking at 2–4 days total, with power off only in defined windows while we tie equipment in. We stage materials so your driveway and walkways remain usable as much as possible, and we keep noise and disruption to a normal daytime construction level, no midnight work, no huge crew camping out in your yard for weeks. At the end, you have a walk-through, we turn on monitoring, and you know what was installed, what was inspected, and how to read your system.