Industry

Solar utilities

Find hot cells and string faults before they cost you yield. Fly thermal, process in Thermalmapper, hand over a report the asset team can act on.

Tell us the site and the deliverable. We'll name the kit. About

This job

Inspecting a solar asset from the air

Solar inspection is the recurring job of finding modules, strings and connectors that are running hot before they fail or cut yield.

Thermal from a Matrice 4T or docked aircraft covers hectares in a morning. Thermalmapper turns the flight into a map and a punch list your O&M team can use.

The deliverable is not a pretty gallery. It is a georeferenced thermal record with severity and location for each anomaly.

What makes solar thermal hard

Irradiance and weather change the picture. A panel that looks hot at 10 am may look normal at 2 pm if cloud moved through. You need consistent flight conditions and a method that accounts for them.

Scale is the other problem. Walking a 50 MW farm with a handheld imager is slow and incomplete. Airborne thermal is how you get coverage; software is how you turn frames into a work order.

And false positives burn trust. Dirt, reflection and framing artefacts look like faults until someone who knows the farm reviews them.

How the day actually runs

Agree the flight window against irradiance and wind. Plan the grid so every string is covered with enough overlap.

Fly with a Matrice 4T for manned missions, or Dock 3 when the site is set up for autonomous runs. Keep altitude and speed consistent so temperatures compare across the farm.

Process in Thermalmapper. Flag hot cells, string underperformance and connector anomalies. Export a map and a list your O&M crew can walk.

Close the loop with a short ground check on the worst offenders when the brief requires it.

What to fly

Part of the job	Capture with	Why
Module and string thermal	Matrice 4T	Radiometric thermal, fast coverage
Repeat autonomous runs	Dock 3 + Matrice 4TD	Same mission, no crew on site every cycle
Processing and reporting	Thermalmapper	Maps anomalies to the array layout
Site context / as-built	Matrice 4E	RGB orthos when the brief needs them

This page is about drone thermal inspection and our software. It is not a payload catalogue for every sensor type.

What you can defend in a report

Relative temperature differences across modules under similar irradiance are what drive the punch list. Absolute temperature claims without conditions are weak.

State flight height, time, weather and processing method. That is what lets next month's flight compare honestly to this one.

What gets handed over

A Thermalmapper report with georeferenced anomalies, severity, and enough context for O&M to find the string. Orthos or RGB context when requested.

MapShare links work when the client needs to browse without CAD.

The common miss

Flying on a bad irradiance day and treating every warm spot as a fault. Or delivering a gallery of JPEGs with no array indexing.

The other miss is one-off flights with no method lock. Without a repeatable plan the trend line is noise.

Start with these

One or two kits that fit this job. Family pages cover the rest of the line.

DJI Matrice 4T

Thermal and zoom for assets that fail after dark.

From $9,499.00

View kit

Thermalmapper - Inspection Software

Thermal reports built for the field.

From $99.00

View kit

Choosing a model

Matrice 4T or a docked system?

Matrice 4T for sites you visit with a crew. Dock 3 when you want the same thermal mission on a schedule without mobilising every time. We size the kit to how often you inspect and whether the site can host a dock.

Why Thermalmapper instead of raw thermal frames?

Raw frames do not map cleanly to strings and work orders. Thermalmapper is the processing and reporting layer we build for solar and industrial thermal jobs, so the deliverable is indexed to the asset, not a folder of images.

Buying & price

Can we trial before we buy?

Yes. Book a demo on a real array or a sample dataset review. We would rather prove the workflow than sell a kit that sits on a shelf.

Accuracy

How reliable are hot-spot calls?

Under consistent irradiance and a locked flight plan, relative deltas between modules are reliable enough for O&M triage. Absolute temperatures need conditions stated. We teach that distinction in handover.

Workflow & data

Will this fit our existing O&M process?

Exports are built for punch lists and GIS overlays. Tell us what system your team already uses and we wire the export during setup.

In the field

Do we need CASA approvals?

Enterprise drone operations in Australia sit under CASA rules for the aircraft and the mission. We help you choose a lawful operating model for the site. That is separate from the thermal workflow itself.

Next step

Bring a real site

Start with a call. If it looks like a fit, we bring the kit to your site and capture the section that usually causes trouble. You keep the data.