Better solar inspection software.

Solar panel inspection software Scopito is enabling the solar inspection business to save tons of time and money, by simplifying the data management workflow.

Conventionally, solar inspections of farms has been very complicated.
It involves collecting and recording substantial amounts of data, but management, analysis, and sharing have been ineffective.

This is what Scopito and Futurewise Aerial recognized. As a result, we partnered up, to create a new and better workflow for solar inspections – and now we have. Read on, to learn how your solar farm inspections can benefit from an upgrade.

Solar panel inspection drone

As with most inspection types, employing drones is a huge benefit that saves time and money, while simultaneously providing high-quality results. With solar inspections, this is especially true, as walking the often vast farms row by row on foot, is an enormous task.

When performing solar panel inspections with a drone, make sure you take the necessary steps to prepare your flight. We have a guide for that, which you can find here. Properly preparing your drone and planning your route, ensures you get the optimal amount of overlap on images, and all the data you need in one flight.

There are several solar panel inspection services you, as a DSP, can offer in a solar inspection. Not all services will be relevant for an inspection, but the most commonly used are:

• Video
• Individual Images (RGB)
• Stitched images
  If you’re debating whether to go with an orthomosaic, or stitched images in your solar inspection, we conducted a little experiment, that you can look at here.
• Thermal images

The latter should always be a major part of your solar panel inspection using a drone. The advantage of drones here is that you can capture thermal and RGB images in the same run. Let’s dive a little further into thermal inspections of solar panels.

Solar panel thermal inspection

Using thermal imaging to identify anomalies in solar panels is very efficient, as most faults create thermal patterns, which can easily be distinguished from their healthy neighbors, in thermal images.

It is often a good idea to use both RGB and Thermal inspection data to correctly identify faults, as it is easier to correctly identify issues when you are cross-referencing both data types.

Solar businesses recognize this but, have traditionally only performed thermal inspection on a small part of the solar plant, using handheld thermal imaging cameras.

Using a drone to lift the thermal imager, allows it to be held at a better angle above the solar modules. The UAV can also travel the site fast, resulting in 100% of the asset being inspected, and no faults left undetected.

To gain more value from these images, Scopito has a thermal analysis tool, which tells you the temperature points of each annotation. This allows you to easily include the most valuable data in your reports.

Solar panel inspection report

When anomalies are captured in the solar plant, you need to locate and report those faults, allowing operatives to return to site and do remedial works.

Solar modules by their nature all look the same, making it hard to identify the “infected” panel in a sea of 40,000+.

A well-planned and methodical workflow, combined with Scopito’s custom maps feature, alleviates this problem to such an extent, that future inspectors are unlikely to ever consider reverting to their old ways.

Of course the exact location of faults are always at the center of Scopito’s solar panel inspection reports, which really add value to your deliverables.

When it comes time to process the results, Scopito becomes a vital tool in the analysis. It allows the user to simply and efficiently work through large amounts of high-resolution imagery, zooming in for a closer inspection, annotating, tagging and reporting.

If you or your clients need to take the thermal image to another program to adjust any thermal settings, then this is also a simple process. Scopito can even analyse the inspection for you, using both AI and human intelligence.

Once an inspection is completed and ready to be handed over, you can generate PDF or CSV reports at the click of a button. These inspection reports include whatever data you deem relevant, and all images are linked to their digital twin in Scopito’s cloud-based platform, making it super simple for the client to see the images in their original resolution.

Sometimes a solar panel inspection report isn’t needed, but rather the client needs access to the inspection itself to review it. Scopito’s supports this too using roles and rights to control access to inspections.

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