Renewable Energy Ready Home (RERH) Solar Site Assessment Tool
The Renewable Energy Ready Home (RERH) Solar Site Assessment Tool is intended to guide home builders in assessing whether a new home has the proper physical orientation to support a future installation of a solar energy system. This tool evaluates the proposed site's solar resource potential based on a series of known factors about the home at the time of construction, such as the home's location and anticipated shading effects at the proposed site. New homes that are found to provide a suitable installation environment are considered good candidates to be outfitted by the builder with the structural and system components needed to support the cost effective installation of a future renewable energy system. For further information on the elements of each specification, please see EPA's Renewable Energy Ready Home Specifications. For questions about RERH please contact James Critchfield at critchfield.james@epa.gov or 202-343-9442.

What's Next?
After entering the required site information into the tool and hitting the calculate button, the user will receive a site assessment indicating whether the home offers a suitable solar resource. Homes that demonstrate a suitable solar resource potential are good candidates to be outfitted as renewable energy ready.
For homes that fail to demonstrate a suitable solar resource potential, builders are encouraged to propose alternate array site locations. The site assessment results are influenced by data inputs for array orientation, array tilt angle and array shading percentage.
Resources
- Solar Water Heating RERH Specification (PDF, 951 KB)
- Solar Photovoltaic RERH Specification (PDF, 5.1 MB)
- Solar Photovoltaics RERH Checklist (PDF, 110 KB)
- Solar Water Heating RERH Checklist (PDF, 93 KB)