Tampa's heat plus salt-air corrosion is a fast track to hot spots and failing junction boxes. A drone thermography sweep plus handheld infrared confirmation finds the failing cell, diode or connector before it takes a whole string offline.
Bay salt aerosol
Anything within a mile of Hillsborough Bay or Old Tampa Bay picks up a salt film that hardens into a haze the first time it bakes in the sun. Rain does not rinse it — it just redeposits it.
Oak canopy and tannin
Hyde Park, Beach Park and Seminole Heights sit under mature live oaks. Catkin drop in March and leaf drop in December leave organic staining that etches if it is left to sit through a wet summer.
Interstate and airport grit
Homes along I-275, I-4, the Selmon and the TPA approach paths accumulate a fine grey carbon film that dulls output without ever looking obviously dirty from the ground.
A genuine mix: 1920s bungalows in Seminole Heights and Hyde Park with architectural shingle and steep 8/12 pitches, barrel and flat concrete tile on the newer Westchase and New Tampa builds, and a growing number of standing-seam metal roofs on South Tampa rebuilds. Pitch and tile fragility drive most of our pricing variation here.
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.
Tampa is inside Hillsborough County, so there is no travel fee on any visit.