Underperforming system
Production is down and you can't pin it on weather. Thermal flight isolates the faulty modules so the O&M crew knows exactly which panels to replace.
Visual sweeps miss what counts. Aerial thermal imaging picks out hotspots, bypass diode failures, cracked cells, and bad interconnects across every panel in the array — and gives you an output-loss estimate so you know which faults are worth fixing first.
Six situations where thermal aerial inspection pays for itself in months.
Production is down and you can't pin it on weather. Thermal flight isolates the faulty modules so the O&M crew knows exactly which panels to replace.
Yearly preventative inspection. Catch early-stage hotspots and bypass diode failures before they cascade into module replacement.
Document failing modules with thermal evidence before the manufacturer warranty expires. Geotagged imagery supports the claim.
Due-diligence inspection before buying a commercial property with an installed array. Verify actual condition versus seller representations.
Hail, debris, or extreme heat events can cause invisible micro-cracking. Thermal flight reveals damage that won't show up on visual inspection for months.
Cover 50–100 acres in a single morning. Per-panel data delivered as a GIS-ready layer for asset management systems.
Radiometric thermal mosaic of the entire array, panel-indexed with row and column coordinates.
Each anomaly classified by signature: hotspot, bypass diode failure, cracked cell, string fault, soiling, or shading.
Directional figure for total estimated production loss across detected faults. Useful for prioritizing remediation spend.
High-resolution visual mosaic paired with the thermal map for context — useful for soiling and physical damage documentation.
Geotagged shapefile or GeoJSON of all detected faults for direct import into asset management systems.
Extended narrative with per-fault classification, severity grading, and replacement priority ranking.
Thermal imaging reveals heat signatures from electrical faults invisible to visual inspection: bypass diode failures, cracked cells, hotspot defects, broken interconnects, junction box faults, and shaded or soiled regions causing localized resistance.
Each fault has a distinctive thermal pattern, so the cause can be identified — not just the symptom.
Mid-day on a clear, sunny day with the array operating under at least 600 W/m² of irradiance. We schedule flights for the highest-irradiance window available and verify with on-site sensors before capture.
Cloudy days are reschedulable at no cost.
No. The array must be operating under load for thermal anomalies to develop, so the inspection happens while the system is generating. No service interruption, no inverter shutdown.
The output-loss estimate is derived from the area and severity of detected anomalies referenced against panel datasheet output curves. It's a useful directional figure for prioritizing remediation, not a guaranteed performance prediction.
For utility-scale arrays, we can pair the thermal data with IV-curve testing for higher fidelity.