Solar and Hurricane Season

What Central Florida Homeowners Should Know

Updated 10.01.2026

Hurricane season in Florida runs from June 1 through November 30. Central Florida is not on the beach, and it is not out of the cone. Ian in 2022 crossed the peninsula. Later storms have done the same. This page is what a home array does in that weather, what it refuses to do, and what to check without getting on the roof. Ordinary Tuesday thunderstorms are the clouds page. The deductible is the insurance page. How the panels are bolted down is the roof page. The rest of the house, evacuation, the supply kit, and how a generator should be used, is in Domuncula’s Florida hurricane guide.

It will not run the house

A normal grid-tied system turns off when the utility goes down. That is required. If it stayed on, it could put power on a line a crew is trying to repair. The app will show zero, or a grid fault, while the sun is still on the glass. The rooms are dark anyway. That zero is the inverter obeying, which is the case on the monitoring page. It is not, by itself, proof the array blew away.

The sunlight-only backup some systems advertise, power while the sun is out and nothing stored, drops when a cloud passes. A hurricane outage is mostly a night problem after the first afternoon. A battery can hold a chosen set of loads, usually the fridge, some lights, the internet, and phones, for a limited time. It will not run central air for days. On Duke Energy Florida and Florida Power & Light (FPL), the battery is this backup. It is not a trick to beat retail net metering on the monthly bill. Orlando Utilities Commission (OUC) is a different bill, and a different reason a battery can also be about money. The battery page splits those. The generator page is the other machine that actually makes power in the dark.

What “built for the wind” means

The Florida Building Code requires the mount to be designed for the wind at that address. The edition on a permit pulled before December 31, 2026, is the 8th. The 9th edition takes effect that day. The permit date is the one that counts.

Central Florida is not the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone. That zone is Miami-Dade and Broward. Orange, Seminole, Osceola, and Lake Counties still use the code wind map, and the number is still high. A national catalog that says the rail is “rated for hurricanes” is not the same thing as a Florida Product Approval, or an engineer’s letter, for the attachment on your roof. The panel’s own mile-per-hour number on a spec sheet is not that letter either. Wind gets under the array. The lags have to hit rafters, at the spacing the approval uses, with the flashing that was tested. Edge and corner zones of the roof need closer attachments. The laws page is the permit. This paragraph is why a permit is the wind plan.

An array that was never permitted, or that was finished and never inspected, is the one to worry about before a storm. The hardware may be fine. Nobody checked.

What the last storms actually showed

After Hurricane Ian, a Category 4 that came ashore near Cayo Costa on September 28, 2022, FPL said about 0.3 percent of the panels in its solar plants were damaged. That was on the order of a couple of thousand panels out of more than 35 million, on 38 of the utility’s own solar farms. Those are long rows of panels on metal frames in a field, built as power plants. They are not the twelve panels on a shingle roof in Seminole County. Quoting 99.7 percent as if it were your house is how the sales pitch gets ahead of the evidence.

The rooftop record is a company report, and it is still useful if you label it. After Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024, Sunnova said about 98 percent of its rooftop systems in the affected areas had no material damage, including about 19,000 of its Florida customers during Milton. That is the installer counting its own customers. It is not a state study. It does not mean a badly lagged array on a soft deck will stay put. It does mean a properly mounted system is not the thing that usually fails first.

The roof around it fails more often than the glass. The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety looked at thousands of buildings in Southwest Florida after Ian. About half the asphalt-shingle roofs had damage, worse on roofs older than about ten years. Tile roofs took less of the serious damage than they did in older storms, except when the roof was already old. Metal roofs had the lowest damage rate in that survey. If the shingles leave, the array may still be on its rails and the house still needs a reroof. The panels then have to come off before the roofers can work. That bill is why a tired roof should be replaced before the array goes on, not discovered after the cone leaves. The roof page is that sequence.

Before the storm

Do not take the panels off. A hurried removal is how you open the roof, stack glass in the garage, and create a pile of unsecured equipment. A permitted system is designed to stay.

Do the things that do not need a ladder.

• Photograph the array from the ground, and save a clear-day graph from the app. After a claim, “it looked like this on Tuesday” is worth more than a description.
• Confirm the insurer knows the system is there, and which deductible applies to hurricane wind. That conversation is the insurance page, and it is too late once the warning is up.
• If you have a battery, turn on the storm-fill feature, or raise the reserve yourself, while the grid is still up. Find the button in May. The battery care page is where that switch lives. Filling the pack from the grid will show up on the bill. That is the point.
• Bring in patio furniture, a grill, and anything else that can become a missile into the glass. The array is tough. A flying chair is how glass breaks.
• Find the solar breaker and the labeled alternating-current disconnect while the yard is dry. You want to know the box. You do not want to hunt for it in the rain.

The inverter will turn itself off when the grid fails. You do not have to shut the system down for that to happen. If you are evacuating, and you can reach that labeled disconnect or the solar breaker without a ladder, opening it is a reasonable extra step. Some Florida utilities tell rooftop customers to do it so the system is not trying to come back onto a damaged grid. Do not climb. Do not unplug connectors on the roof. Those connectors can be live in daylight.

If a portable generator can be plugged into the house panel, the solar breakers have to be off, or a proper transfer switch has to isolate the generator, before that generator runs. A generator and a grid-tied inverter fighting over the same panel is how equipment and people get hurt. The generator page is the safe version of that setup.

After the storm

Stay off the roof. Wet tile is a fall, and a damaged roof is not a viewing platform. From the ground, or from a window, look for a panel that is missing, a corner that is lifted, rails that are twisted, wires that are hanging, or debris sitting on the glass. Binoculars are enough.

Treat damaged equipment as energized until a licensed person says it is not. A grid-tied inverter shuts off its output to the house when the utility is down. The panels themselves still make direct-current electricity whenever light hits them. A torn lead in the yard is not a dead wire because the neighborhood is dark. Do not coil it, and do not let anyone else. Keep people and pets away and call a licensed electrician or the company that still honors the workmanship warranty.

If nothing looks wrong and the only symptom is a blank app, wait for the internet and the grid. A gateway offline message is often the modem, not the array. When utility power returns, a healthy system should start producing again on its own. Give it a clear hour before you decide it is dead. If it stays at zero on a bright day with the app online, then use the monitoring page: breaker, alert text, and a screenshot, in that order.

Photograph damage before anything is moved, except what you must move to stop a worse leak or a live wire. The hurricane deductible is often 2 percent, 5 percent, or 10 percent of the dwelling limit, and a few cracked panels can sit under it. The insurance page has the window, which starts with a hurricane warning and runs until 72 hours after the last watch or warning in the state. If the system is leased, the contract says whose insurer pays for the equipment. Your policy is still the one for the roof. Do not let a roofer tear the array off without a written plan to put it back, and do not sign a solar repair from a door-knocker who showed up with the debris.

A system that was bent, flooded at the inverter, or partly removed is not a candidate for you to flip back on. It may also need the building department and the utility again before it can operate. That is a repair permit, not a settings change in the app.

If you are buying during the season

You can install in hurricane season. You should not install into a named storm, and you should not leave an unfinished array on the roof over a weekend with a cone on the county. Open penetrations and unbolted rails are the failure the code never got to inspect.

Ask for the Florida Product Approval number, or the engineer’s seal, on the mount that will actually be used. Ask whether the fasteners land in rafters. Ask what they charge to remove and reinstall after a reroof, because that is the likely hurricane bill even when the glass survives. Ask what the house can run for how many hours if the grid is down, and make them point at the battery that does it. If the answer is “the panels will carry you,” they are describing a different system from the one in the quote.

The installer guide is the license check. The skip-solar page is the case where the insurer will not cover the array, or the roof is already one storm from a tear-off. Those are reasons to wait. The existence of hurricane season is not.

This page is general information, not engineering or insurance advice. The permit set and your policy control the house you have.