Re-Roofing a Cape Coral Home With Solar on It: Who Removes the Panels, What It Costs, and the Roofer Handoff

September 4, 2026

If your Cape Coral roof is being replaced and there is a solar array on it, a licensed solar or electrical contractor removes the panels 1 to 3 days before tear-off and resets them after the roof is dried in, at $200 to $400 per panel, with new flashed attachments usually extra at $25 to $60 each and the reinstall permit and utility paperwork at $200 to $500. The roofer will not touch the panels, and should not. This post is the whole sequence, the money, and the three lines you need in the roofing contract before you sign it.

Why this is happening to half the county at once

Southwest Florida is in the middle of the largest re-roofing wave in its history, and it has three causes stacked on top of each other.

Hurricane Ian. The National Hurricane Center’s final report puts Ian’s landfall on Cayo Costa at 1905 UTC on September 28, 2022 with 130-knot sustained winds, a second landfall near Punta Gorda at 125 knots, and 6 to 9 feet of surge inundation in Pine Island, Cape Coral, and the communities at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee. In Lee County, 52,514 structures were impacted, 5,369 destroyed and 14,245 with major damage. Ian’s Florida total was $109.5 billion, the costliest hurricane in the state’s history. Tens of thousands of roofs that stayed on did so with lifted tiles, torn underlayment, and fasteners that had been loaded past their rating.

Hurricane Milton. Two years later, on October 9, 2024, Milton’s rainbands spun up an EF2 tornado with 132 mph winds that the National Weather Service Tampa Bay survey tracked 16.56 miles from south of Gladiolus Drive in Fort Myers, across Colonial Boulevard where it tore a large portion of a roof off a home on Orangewood Avenue, over the Caloosahatchee, and through North Fort Myers manufactured-home communities before lifting near US 41. An EF1 in Matlacha ripped half the roof off two homes.

The insurance clock. Florida Statute 627.7011(5), added in the May 2022 special session, says an insurer may not refuse to issue or renew a homeowner’s policy solely because of roof age if the roof is under 15 years old. For a roof 15 years or older, the insurer must allow an inspection at the homeowner’s expense, and may not refuse solely on age if the inspection shows five or more years of useful life. Read that from the insurer’s side: a 15-year-old shingle roof in the southeast Cape that cannot pass the inspection is getting replaced at renewal, or the policy is not getting renewed. Solar arrays, most of which went on between 2015 and 2023, are sitting on exactly those roofs.

Who is legally allowed to remove the panels

Not the roofer. Florida Statute 489.105(3) defines a solar contractor as one whose services consist of the installation, alteration, repair, maintenance, relocation, or replacement of photovoltaic systems and any equipment used with them. Electrical contractors licensed by the state carry the same scope. The roofing contractor definition in the same statute covers roofing, waterproofing, coatings, skylights, and roof-deck attachments. It does not cover the array or its wiring. A Lee County solar installer’s own published guidance on the subject is blunt: roofers are explicitly not authorized to remove, reinstall, or handle solar panels or the associated electrical components, and the reinstall permit can only be pulled by a licensed solar (CVC) or electrical (EC) contractor.

That leaves three candidates: the original installer, a solar service contractor, or an electrical contractor who does solar. The original installer is often the natural choice and often no longer exists. SunPower filed Chapter 11 in August 2024. Titan Solar Power closed June 13, 2024. Pink Energy filed Chapter 7 on October 7, 2022. Vision Solar filed Chapter 7 on December 28, 2023. ADT Solar announced its exit on January 24, 2024. Dozens of local dealers went with them. If your installer is still around, ask them; if they quote $500 a panel or a six-week lead time, or if the phone is disconnected, that is what a solar service contractor is for.

The sequence, day by day

Weeks before: plan review. Photos of the array from the ground (every roof face), the inverter label, and the app screenshot. From that the solar crew knows panel count, racking (IronRidge, Unirac, SnapNrack), attachment type (lag-and-flashing on shingle, tile hooks on tile, seam clamps on metal), inverter architecture (string, SolarEdge, Enphase), and roof material. That is enough to quote and to start the permit drawings.

Weeks before: the permit. Inside Cape Coral city limits, the Building Division at City Hall, 1015 Cultural Park Boulevard, permits roofing, electrical, and solar work through the EnerGov Citizen Self Service portal. In unincorporated Lee County, Building and Permitting Services at 1500 Monroe Street handles it through eConnect, which contractors are required to use. The county’s Solar-Photovoltaic guide says a permit is required to add or modify any photovoltaic system, and requires a site plan, an electrical diagram, signed and sealed wind-load documentation from a Florida-registered design professional showing the uplift zone and pressure for the roof area where the panels sit, weight documentation under 5 pounds per square foot and 45 pounds per attachment, and construction drawings, under the Florida Building Code 8th Edition (2023) and the 2020 NEC. This is a separate permit from the roofer’s re-roof permit. Both are open at the same time.

Day minus 1 to 3: detach. Disconnects and rapid shutdown locked out. Every string labeled at both ends. Microinverters or optimizers stay on their panels, labeled by position. Panels come off, stack on pallets on site, get covered. Rails and hardware bagged and labeled. Conduit capped at the roof. Every attachment point photographed for the record.

Day 0 through dry-in: roofing. The roofer strips, re-decks where needed, dries in, and installs the new roof. If the roofer is setting the solar flashings, this is when they go in, on the layout the solar crew provided.

After the roofing final: reset. New flashed attachments if the solar crew is setting them, then rails, panels in the original positions, wiring restored by the labels, rapid shutdown verified, grounding and bonding checked, labels replaced.

Same day or next: re-commission. Inverter startup, per-panel or per-string production verified in monitoring, ground-fault and insulation checks, a production reading against expected output for the day.

Within days: close out. Final inspections requested. Lee County closes a roof-mounted system with a 207 Solar Final and a 305 Electrical Final; the City of Cape Coral has its equivalents. Utility notified if anything about the interconnection changed.

The money

What moves the per-panel number: roof type (shingle at the bottom, tile at the top, standing-seam metal with clamps often below shingle), racking condition (canal-front hardware corrodes and gets replaced), access (single-story block ranch versus a two-story tile roof in a gated community), and whether the layout changes. A material change, tile to metal for instance, changes the attachment type and therefore the wind-load calculation, and goes on the permit as a modification. Full ranges on the pricing page.

Two things worth doing while the panels are on the ground. First, an inspection: every connector is visible, every panel can be checked for cracked cells, and corroded MC4s get caught before they go back up. Second, if the inverter is 12 years old or more, replace it now under the same permit and visit rather than paying for a second permit in two years; see inverter replacement.

The three lines for the roofing contract

Get these in writing before you sign with the roofer.

1. Dates and sequence. The tear-off date and the dry-in date, and that the solar contractor detaches before tear-off and resets after dry-in. A roofer who arrives to an array still on the roof either waits or, worse, does not.
2. Who sets the attachments, and who warrants them. Solar attachments are flashed roof penetrations. Whoever installs them warrants the roof against leaks at those points. Many Lee County roofers prefer to set the solar flashings during the roof so their warranty is clean; others want the solar crew to do it under the solar permit. Either works. Silence does not, because the first leak becomes a two-trade argument.
3. Conduit, boxes, and the roof warranty. That the roofer will not cut, relocate, or cover conduit and junction boxes without calling the solar contractor, and that the roof warranty is not voided by the solar reinstall. The solar crew provides the attachment layout and the flashing specification for the roofer’s file.

Tile, shingle, metal

The southeast Cape’s original 1960s and 1970s block bungalows and 1980s and 1990s tract homes are mostly shingle, the fastest reset. The canal-front southwest and the Bonita Springs and Estero gated communities are mostly concrete tile, the slowest: tiles lifted and re-set around every attachment, flashed tile hooks, and a roofer who leaves the field tiles off around each point until the solar crew is done or sets the hooks to the solar layout. Standing-seam metal takes seam clamps with no penetrations, which is one reason some owners switch to metal when the roof comes off, and which is a layout and wind-load change on the permit.

The two utilities

Cape Coral, North Fort Myers, Pine Island, and Lehigh Acres are LCEC, the cooperative founded in 1940 when North Fort Myers grove owner George Judd sold the Mariana Grove plant to its members. Fort Myers, Bonita Springs, Estero, and Punta Gorda are FPL. A reset that puts the same panels and the same inverter back in the same layout does not change the interconnection, and both utilities simply want the permit closed. But FPL’s Tier 1 interconnection agreement requires a new application and agreement at least 30 calendar days before any modification that raises the system’s rated output, and LCEC’s standard agreement requires the building official’s certificate that the installation was permitted and approved before equipment goes into service. If the re-roof is also when you replace the inverter or add panels, the utility filing has a lead time, and the solar contractor should be filing it, not you.

What can go wrong, and what it looks like

• The roofer’s crew “helps” by unbolting the array. Unlicensed work, no labels, no lockout, and nobody responsible for the reinstall. Reset by a licensed crew afterward costs the same or more, and the permit history now has a gap.
• Panels stored uncovered for three weeks in a stalled job. Cracked glass from debris, water in connectors. Off-site storage is cheap by comparison.
• The array goes back without a permit. Common on 2023 post-Ian resets done in a hurry. It surfaces at the next insurance inspection or the home sale, and closing it afterward means engineering on a roof that has to be opened up to inspect.
• Attachments reused on the old lag pattern. The old holes are in the old decking, which may be gone; new attachments go into rafters or trusses on the engineered layout.
• The system is reset but never re-commissioned. Producing at 60 percent for a year because one string was never reconnected and the app was never checked. Re-commissioning with per-panel verification is part of the job, not an extra.

If you are reading this before the roofer is booked

Loop the solar contractor in first. The roofer’s tear-off date sets the detach date, the attachment question needs an answer before the roofing contract is signed, and the solar permit has its own review time at the city or county. A week of planning is the difference between a roof that waits for nobody and a roof that waits for the panels. Send the three photos and the roofer’s name; the FAQ covers the rest, and the about page covers who does the work.