On a large Plant City commercial or ground-mount array, walking every module is impractical. Drone thermography covers hundreds of panels in one flight and pinpoints the handful that are actually failing.
Agricultural soil dust
Tilling and harvest raise fine sandy loam that travels well on dry-season winds and settles heavily. This is the highest particulate loading of any city we serve.
Plastic mulch and field burn residue
Strawberry culture uses acres of plastic mulch, and field operations put a distinctive fine residue in the air that bonds to warm glass.
Truck and equipment diesel
Harvest season brings constant heavy-vehicle traffic on rural roads, adding soot to the dust already there.
A wide spread: metal roofs on agricultural and older rural properties, shingle in Walden Lake and the newer subdivisions, and standing-seam and low-slope commercial on packing houses and warehouses. Metal roofs change how we approach both cleaning and critter guard fastening.
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.
Plant City is inside Hillsborough County, so there is no travel fee on any visit.