Salt-air corrosion attacks connectors, junction boxes and grounding hardware long before it is visible. Thermography sees the resulting resistance as heat, which is how you catch a coastal fault while it is still a maintenance item.
Salt aerosol
The defining problem here. Salt film builds within weeks, hazes the glass, and rain does not remove it — it dissolves and redeposits it. Untreated, it also accelerates frame and clamp corrosion.
Bird activity
Osprey, gulls and pelicans are constant along the canals. Droppings are acidic, opaque and can shade an entire cell string until removed.
Marine humidity and biological growth
High year-round humidity lets algae and mildew establish along the lower module frame where water sits after dew.
Concrete barrel and flat tile dominates the waterfront communities of MiraBay, Symphony Isles and Andalucia, with architectural shingle across Waterset. Two-story elevations and steep tile are common, which makes ground-based pole work the safe default.
We fly a radiometric thermal camera over the full array under load, then follow up with handheld imaging on anything ambiguous or shaded. Radiometric means every pixel carries an actual temperature value, not just a false-colour gradient, so we can measure the delta between a suspect cell and its healthy neighbours instead of guessing from a pretty picture.
Single-cell hot spots from micro-cracks or manufacturing defects. Whole-substring heating that points to a failed bypass diode. Warm junction boxes and connectors that signal a resistive joint on its way to an arc fault. Reverse-biased shaded cells that soiling or a new tree branch has pushed into dissipating power instead of producing it.
Apollo Beach is inside Hillsborough County, so there is no travel fee on any visit.