Solar Panel Thermal Inspections Las Vegas

When it comes to solar panel thermal inspections Las Vegas is served by us.

Las Vegas, NV, and the surrounding areas have tremendously taken advantage of solar energy over the past 10 years. The best means of inspection of your panels is through IR or Thermal Imagery, to detect hot spots, dead cells, faults, and other issues that will cause your system to not perform at peak levels and in some cases prevent system shutdown.  
The best time to get a thermal inspection is after a new installation to verify it is working the way it should be. Another time is before your warranty is up from your provider to get any issues fixed before you own them. Thirdly, at least a once-a-year inspection protects your investment and ensures you are not losing valuable energy.

We do a visual inspection along with a thermal inspection with a 640 x 512 radiometric sensor. High resolution and one of the best sensors in the business.

Detect Panel Damage

Thermal Imagery can be used to capture potential ‘hot spots’ on solar panels. A hot spot is a PV cell, or a group of cells, operating at a significantly higher temperature than the rest of the cells of the panel. This can be caused by any of the following:

  • Deterioration of the PV current due to dust or dirt accumulated on its surface
  • Damaged or broken up cells (mechanical damage, break of protective layers)
  • Resistive heating due to the improper cell interconnect
  • Errors in the laying out of the electrical installation-bypass diode etc.
  • Faulty bypass diodes, etc

Anyone or more of the above situations can cause a PV cell to be defective. The defective cell starts passing more current than it generates, becoming reverse biased, enters breakdown and uses power instead of generating it, and starts consuming energy generated by nearby cells. This causes it to appear “hotter” than other cells in the image.

Drones have become a vital tool for solar panel inspections, collecting data more than 50x faster than manual methods and improving safety by avoiding hazardous man-hours and the emergence of UAVs as the go-to tool for this type of work looks set to accelerate, as the trend towards adopting renewable energy is expected to grow massively in the coming years

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