How do you determine the uplift on solar panels due to wind? Call a structural engineer. If you are an engineer and you are reading this, shame on you... but I'll help you with the first part. Find your design wind speed.

I've probably looked up the design wind speed for thousands of locations throughout my career. Each time I cursed ASCE for offering such difficult to read wind maps. The maps that ASCE overlays their wind contours on shows county outlines... and that's it. I have a hard enough time figuring out where the county is that I live in, let alone some county 4 states over.

So what did I do? I came up with the solution: www.windspeedbyzip.com. It's easy, even for an engineer. Type in the city and state or the zip code of the area you want to search. WindSpeedByZip returns the design wind speed for that location.

Now that you have the design wind speed, go to ASCE and calculate the uplift.