Commercial & utility solar
Radiometric aerial thermography to IEC TS 62446-3. Every module scanned, every anomaly located and classified, in a report your O&M team, insurer or module manufacturer can act on.
Back to you within one working day with a price and a provisional flight date.
Last step. Takes about 20 seconds.
5.0 on Google from 66 reviews
Best Small BusinessSEANZ Awards 2024
PrequalifiedHealth and safety
Who this is for
Radiometric thermal imaging finds faults you can’t see from the ground or in your monitoring data, across every module on the site.
What we find
Faulty components run hot before they fail, or while they cost you output. From the air with a radiometric camera we see them across the whole array, rather than the handful a handheld check reaches. Each finding gets a location, a temperature difference, an IEC class and a recommended action. Class 1 is no abnormality, Class 2 is a thermal abnormality to fix at the next scheduled visit, Class 3 is safety-relevant and gets flagged for immediate action.
Cracked cells, shaded cells, baked-on soiling. Left alone they degrade the panel permanently and in rare cases start fires.
A single shorted bypass diode typically drops a third of a module’s output, and the inverter usually won’t flag it. Thermal shows the warm substring straight away.
On a large system a dead string can sit unnoticed for months. It shows up cold on the first pass.
Potential induced degradation shows as a patchwork of warmer cells that gets worse toward the negative end of the string, often before monitoring flags it.
Hot junction boxes show through the glass. Hot connectors and cabling, a leading cause of PV fires, show wherever the camera can see them. Class 3 findings get flagged for immediate action.
Glass breakage, delamination, vegetation shading and soiling, captured in RGB alongside every thermal frame.
Captures from our own inspections. Brighter means warmer. Heat where there shouldn’t be any is where we start, and every one gets checked against the RGB frame before it’s classed.
How we work
What you get
Drone-only operators hand you a report and leave. We clean, thermally inspect and bird-proof the array in the same mobilisation.
The scan after cleaning is the one that counts. With the soiling gone and the glass dry, anything still running hot is a fault in the module or the wiring, not dirt, and that scan becomes your clean baseline. The scan before records what the dirt was costing you. On a solar farm that means one site induction, one traffic plan and one invoice instead of three of each.
Most plants arrive with some faults. Baseline them before the EPC leaves site.
Book two months out, usually month 10 or 22, while the fixes are still the EPC’s cost.
Sites inspected twice a year showed 7% lower equipment-driven loss than sites inspected once (Raptor Maps Global Solar Report 2026).
Documented evidence for the insurance claim.
An independent thermal and visual condition survey for your due diligence.
Underwriters now price the maintenance file. Weak files get higher deductibles and sub-limits (Willis, in Insurance Business NZ, September 2026).
How we work
Send us the site type, size and location. A firm price and a provisional flight date come back within one working day, confirmed against the forecast the day before.
Site induction, AirShare clearance if needed, then every module flown inside the irradiance window. Nobody on your roof, no shutdown.
An IEC TS 62446-3 report with every finding mapped and classified, an estimated power loss on each, plus a remediation list for your work orders. 3 working days for rooftops, 10 for farms.
Not for the work we do. Part 101 covers surveys under 120m, within line of sight, with the property owner’s consent and nobody overflown who hasn’t agreed to it, and that describes almost every rooftop and solar farm in the country. Our pilot holds the Part 101 pilot certificate that allows operations near aerodromes with the operator’s agreement, and we handle AirShare clearances in controlled airspace.
No. Thermal needs strong sun and low wind or the results are meaningless. We book a weather window and confirm the day before.
We report and classify. Electrical remediation goes to your O&M electrician or installer, and the report is written so they can walk straight to the module. Cleaning and bird-proofing we do ourselves.
As-built drawings or a string map (for rooftops, a roof plan is enough), site induction details, access and a contact on the day. And leave the system running as normal: thermal only shows faults on an array under load, so don’t isolate it for us, and tell us if an inverter is down.
Based in the Bay of Plenty, with crews across Auckland, Waikato, Northland, Hawke’s Bay and Taranaki. Solar farm surveys nationwide.
This page is for commercial and utility sites. For a home, see our residential solar panel cleaning, which includes a 7-point inspection on every visit.
Who turns up
Eco Shine Solar is owned and run by three brothers, Edwin, Sam and Ben, born and raised in the Bay of Plenty.
Before solar we represented New Zealand in beach volleyball, picking up a bronze at the Commonwealth Games. We’ve brought the same work ethic from the sand to the roofs, cleaning solar since 2017.
Every job is done by our own team, with pure-water gear and a written report at the end.
Our story →
Tell us the site type, size and location. We’ll come back within one working day with a firm price and a provisional flight date.
