Commercial Building Inspections
Drones are changing site and asset inspections, providing detailed views and the data you require within hours of take off. What’s more, drone inspections, data collection, and asset condition monitoring are far safer for crews than traditional methods.
Why Use Drone Services for Commercial Building Inspections
Drone inspections help with vital tasks that keep buildings in excellent condition. Drones perform asset and facility inspections, industrial photogrammetry, Thermal, and more. Drones provide several benefits for doing building exterior inspections over traditional inspection techniques. This is particularly true when looking for leaks and wear in difficult-to-reach places like facades, roofs and envelopes.
- SPEED - The inspection will be comprehensive and done in a fraction of the time.
- SAFETY - Asset managers use drones to conduct inspections of rooftops and hard-to-reach areas, which can be time-consuming and dangerous for workers. The use of drones helps to improve safety and efficiency while reducing costs.
- Cost Effectiveness - Incorporating technology into property management is helping to improve efficiency and safety while reducing costs.
Roof Inspections
Roofs are very expensive to replace. A routine maintenance plan is critical to ensuring a roof can provide many years of service by uncovering problem areas before they go too far.
- Automated Mission capture high resolution RGB and thermal photos used to make an orthomosaic of the roof.
- RGB and thermal video is captured.
- Look for indications of potential water leaks, damage or wear comparing RGB to thermal images.
- Perform inspection using thermal video and compare to RGB video looking for water issues or HVAC issues by measuring “hot spots”.
Commercial Building Thermal Imaging
Facade Inspections
Use Thermal Imagery along with high resolution photos to detect corrosion, integrity and leaks. Unintrusive routine inspections will minimize damage to structure and building contents. The scope of the inspection includes
The thermal images can have colour pallets assigned to help best understand conditions. Areas around usual suspect spots like seams can develop leaks. If the inspector identifies temperature changes along these seams, it is an indication of a potential leak.
HVAC systems will also indicate failure if equipment is too hot or cold. These are all items which are not visible to our eyes but detectable with today’s high quality thermal camera’s.
Maintenance crews may scan a building’s facade with a drone and collect high-quality photographs and videos. This can allow for a comprehensive inspection of a building’s facade and save time and money.
Additionally, it can document the condition of a building’s facade over time. This can be useful for identifying areas of deterioration and planning future repairs.
In the image bellow, the roof is being inspected by watching both RGB and thermal video at the same time. This is a very good example of the importance of the comparrison. Some items appear a different temperature from the roof surface because of debris while other temperature variations not visible to our eyes warrant closer investigation. The inspection should take place either very early in the morning or in the evening. The roof surface temperature will change faster than water will. Because of this, a spot with water ingress will be warmer than the roof surface in an early evening inspection.
Compare and inspect with RGB and Thermal Video Side By Side.
Safe, comprehensive inspections and maintenance. More and more building managers use drone service providers to collect high quality data not available by manual inspections. Records can be kept to monitor roof and building condition over time.
Quick and thorough compliance monitoring. Drones gather real-time data rapidly and provide high resolution imaging, allowing organizations to ensure environmental and other regulatory compliance.
Fast and cost effective. Manual inspections usually take days to conduct, costing up to thousands of dollars in worker hours and asset downtime. Drone inspections can be conducted in a matter of hours with limited downtime.
Use of advanced imaging tools. With drone aerial imaging and videography, building inspections can take advantage of 3D modeling, LiDAR, and industrial photogrammetry to have the information to make more effective business decisions.
Improve environmental assessments. Drones can gather comprehensive data for environmental impact assessments, allowing you to identify and avoid previously hidden problems before they develop into problems.