No welding is needed, you can use metal clamps to hold the pipes together. I have my panels on metal structure with no welding, I used bolts for joins.
Yes, but the clamps I've found designed for that sort of use are quite expensive, and add a substantial margin to the project cost - and they're not needed if you can weld it up, or have someone else weld it up.
As I understand NEC from talking to various people and reading quite a bit of it myself, someone else can do the frames for a homeowner installed solar project, but "rails and up" has to either be the homeowner or a licensed electrician, because the rails are typically considered part of the grounding system and therefore electrical work.
In any case, costs doing it yourself are far, far lower than paying someone else to do it. And ground mount is an awful lot nicer to work with than roof mount.
> but "rails and up" has to either be the homeowner or a licensed electrician, because the rails are typically considered part of the grounding system and therefore electrical work.
Here in NM, you can (fairly easily) get licensed as the homeowner to do your own install of such a system. That's what did. My total cost (with those expensive metal clamps and nice aluminum panel rails etc) was around $1.80/W
In think in my country I can do all the work myself and I need a certified electrician to connect it to the grid, nothing else. The law is very different from country to country, for me the labor was extremely cheap while the panels and MPPT are more expensive than in US.
