It’s considered an industry best practice to conduct drone thermography inspections at 12-month or 6-month intervals. Older legacy PV systems may necessitate more frequent proactive maintenance inspections and should be monitored more vigilantly.

Allocating a budget for these inspections within your preventive maintenance and O&M contracts is advisable to ensure funds are set aside for these important checkups.

Yes. By utilizing drone inspections, you can efficiently identify anomalies such as hot spots and activated bypass diodes, which are indicators of potential module failures. Our inspections meticulously document temperature differences between adjacent cells, a method widely recognized by manufacturers. With this evidence, you’ll have the necessary documentation to support robust warranty claims, saving you valuable time and labor typically associated with manual inspections.

If you suspect your system has warrantable issues, and you need data to prove it, please contact us.

The coverage area for a drone thermography inspection can be influenced by various factors such as flight altitude, weather conditions, irradiance, and more. However, a general estimate suggests that 20-30 MW can be inspected per day when conducting an IEC 62446-3:2017 compliant inspection, with a ground sample distance (GSD) of 3.0cm.

Yes. Unlike other inspection methods which result in downtime, drone inspections can be performed without de-energizing any equipment. For best results, the system should operate at maximum load, but a minimum of 60% load is still acceptable to perform the inspection.

It’s important to note that other technician tasks requiring equipment power-off, such as inverter troubleshooting or maintenance, cannot be performed simultaneously with the drone inspection.

This is entirely flexible to suit your company’s needs. Typically, clients receive a detailed .PDF inspection report containing information such as estimated annual loss kWh/$, anomaly type classification, recommended remedial action, and more. Additionally, you’ll receive an anomaly map pinpointing issues overlaid on your electrical and string drawings. The same data is provided in .CSV format for convenient organization.

Each report is fully customizable, allowing you to filter out specific anomalies or focus on significant performance outliers, for example.

Access to an online viewing platform is also available, although this is completely optional. If you choose to opt in, rest assured you can review the inspection data without needing to sign up for extra software or subscriptions.