Nobody asked Yehuda Gittelson to start a podcast. That’s worth stating because the origin story of most independent shows involves some version of encouragement from friends, a nudge from a colleague, a gap someone pointed out. Gittelson’s version is less flattering. He was driving back from a job site in Brunswick, listening to a clean energy podcast that spent 40 minutes discussing grid-scale battery storage without once mentioning the people who install the batteries, and he got annoyed enough to do something about it.
“I wasn’t thinking about starting a show,” he said. “I was thinking about how nobody on this show has ever held a drill.”
On The Roof launched a few months later. The audience found it without being asked to, which tells you something about the gap Gittelson had identified. He didn’t run ads. He didn’t pitch it to publications. He uploaded episodes to a free hosting platform and mentioned it to people he knew in the industry. Within a few weeks, installers and technicians he’d never met were sending messages saying they’d been looking for something like this.
The Audience Nobody Was Serving
There are many people working in solar energy in the United States. Add wind technicians, energy auditors, weatherization crews, heat pump installers, and the adjacent trades that support clean energy deployment, and you’re looking at a workforce numbering in the hundreds of thousands and continuing to expand.
Most of them don’t see themselves in the media coverage of their industry. The coverage tends to aim at investors, policymakers, or homeowners weighing a purchase. It treats clean energy as a financial product or a political issue. The people who show up every morning and do the physical labor of building the grid out, panel by panel and wire by wire, are largely invisible in that conversation.
Gittelson knew this because he was one of them. He’d search for podcasts and articles about the kind of work he actually does and come up mostly empty.
“There’s a whole workforce out there that’s been talked about but never talked to,” he told a listener who’d emailed asking about the show’s origin. “I figured if I wanted to hear from them, other people probably did too.”
What Showed Up in the Inbox
The messages started arriving after the third or fourth episode. An installer in Vermont who listened during his commute. An energy auditor in New Hampshire who forwarded an episode to her whole team. A retired electrician in Bangor asked whether Gittelson took guest suggestions. Then a longer, more detailed email from someone in Colorado describing a battery storage installation that had gone sideways, asking whether Gittelson would consider doing an episode about failure modes in residential storage systems. He’s planning to.
The audience is small. Gittelson doesn’t have download numbers that would impress anyone in the podcast industry. But people respond to the episodes at a rate that doesn’t match the size. Listeners write in with specific technical questions. They push back on things guests have said. They recommend other people Gittelson should interview.
What he hasn’t gotten is casual listeners. People don’t stumble onto On The Roof because an algorithm surfaced it. They find it because someone in their professional world mentioned it, or because they went looking for trade-level clean energy content and there wasn’t much else out there. The audience chose the show. That shapes everything about how it feels.
“I don’t have to explain what NABCEP is,” Gittelson said. “I don’t have to explain what a string inverter does. The people listening already know. That lets us skip the basics and get into the stuff that actually matters.”
What He Didn’t Plan
Yehuda Gittelson didn’t set out to build a community. He wanted better conversations than the ones he was hearing elsewhere. People started connecting with each other anyway.
A guest from one episode reached out to a guest from a different episode after hearing the other’s interview. Two installers in different parts of Maine who’d never crossed paths met up after discovering they both listened. Gittelson wasn’t involved in either case. The podcast created the context. The connections were someone else’s doing.
He’s kicked around ideas for expanding this. A discussion space of some kind. Maybe tying something to an industry conference. For now, though, the show remains what it was at the start. One host, a recording setup in Portland, conversations released every two weeks into a space that was emptier than it should’ve been.
Yehuda Gittelson built On The Roof for an audience he believed existed. They showed up, which was the part he’d hoped for. Then they started talking to each other, which wasn’t. He’s still not sure what that turns into, but he’s paying attention.
