For owners, managers & energy assessors

Drone Building Envelope Thermal Survey

Drone inspections from $175 near you

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What do you need?
Where's the property?

Free to post · Usually a reply the same day

219 inspection pilots listed · Pay the pilot directly, no commission

Independent FAA Part 107 pilots who cover your area quote and fly the job.

Free to post

Two minutes, no card, no commitment.

Pay the pilot directly

No commission or markup on their price.

FAA Part 107 pilots

The license all paid drone work requires.

Usually a reply the same day

From a pilot, or from our team if no pilot has answered.

How it works

Three steps, and the first one is free

  1. Describe the job

    The form opens with this page's answers already filled in. Add the location and anything specific to your site.

  2. A pilot near you sends a price

    Pilots whose service area and services match are emailed. Usually a reply the same day, from a pilot or from our team.

  3. Book them and pay them directly

    Check their certificate, kit and sample work, then pay the pilot. SkyLog takes no cut and adds no markup.

What to know before you book

The conditions this needs, and why they are strict

Thermography of an envelope depends on a temperature difference across it, so it wants a genuine gap between inside and out — a rule of thumb is at least ten degrees Celsius, sustained for several hours before the survey rather than achieved an hour beforehand. It wants the building heated and occupied as normal. It wants dry surfaces, because rain equalises everything, and low wind, because wind strips away the surface differences the method reads. And it wants darkness, or at least several hours after sunset, so that solar loading from the day has dissipated — a wall in late afternoon is showing you where the sun was, not where the insulation is not. In practice this makes it a heating-season, night-time survey in most climates, and a survey booked outside those conditions will produce images that look convincing and mean very little.

What it finds

Missing, slumped or displaced insulation, which typically reads as a distinct patch or a pattern following the construction. Thermal bridging at slab edges, balconies, lintels, columns and junctions — a design characteristic rather than a defect, but one worth quantifying before deciding what a retrofit can realistically achieve. Air leakage around openings, service penetrations and at junctions, which shows as plumes rather than patches and is much clearer when the building is under slight pressure difference. Failed glazing units and degraded frames. And on some buildings, the outline of the structure itself showing through the facade, which tells you how much of the heat loss is fabric and how much is detail.

What it cannot tell you

It does not measure heat loss in watts, and any report presenting it as an energy figure has stopped describing the measurement. It reads surface temperature and nothing behind the surface, so it infers rather than observes. It cannot see through glass — a window shows its own surface, not the room. Highly reflective cladding and low-emissivity coatings are difficult and sometimes unreadable, because they mostly reflect the sky rather than radiate their own temperature. And it cannot distinguish a cold patch caused by missing insulation from one caused by moisture, air movement or a duct without something else to corroborate it. The honest deliverable is a prioritised map of anomalies with likely causes, not a verdict.

Who should interpret it

For a survey whose output is a spending decision, the interpretation matters more than the capture, and they are separate skills. A pilot with a good payload can produce technically correct radiometric imagery; reading it against the building's construction, occupancy and heating pattern is thermography. Ask for Level I or Level II thermography certification where the report will be relied on, ask who is writing the interpretation, and ask for the radiometric files themselves so a third party — your energy assessor, a designer, a contractor pricing the work — can re-examine the data rather than accepting a set of coloured pictures.

What this settles

  • Finds missing, slumped or displaced insulation as distinct patches, often following the construction.
  • Quantifies thermal bridging at slab edges, balconies, lintels and junctions before you decide what a retrofit can achieve.
  • Shows air leakage around openings and penetrations as plumes rather than patches.
  • Picks up failed glazing units and degraded frames across a whole elevation at once.

What it does not

  • Measure heat loss in watts. Any report presenting it as an energy figure has stopped describing the measurement.
  • See through glass. A window shows its own surface, not the room behind it.
  • Read highly reflective cladding or low-emissivity coatings, which mostly reflect the sky.
  • Separate a cold patch caused by missing insulation from one caused by moisture, air movement or a duct, without corroboration.

This is a heating-season, night-time survey needing a sustained temperature difference, dry surfaces and low wind. Flown outside those conditions it produces images that look convincing and mean very little.

Why post it on SkyLog

Every elevation, including the ones nobody scans

Ground-level thermography reaches the first two storeys and the parts you can stand back from. Upper floors, setbacks, parapets and roof interfaces — where thermal bridging concentrates — are routinely the least surveyed and the most revealing.

Whole-building patterns

Individual cold spots matter less than the pattern across a facade. A whole-elevation capture shows whether a problem is one flat, one riser or the entire west face, and that distinction is what decides the scope of work.

Targets a retrofit budget

The point of the survey is prioritisation. Money spent on the elevation that is actually failing beats money spread evenly across a building, and this is the cheapest way to tell the two apart.

Free to post

Posting and receiving quotes costs nothing, and SkyLog takes no commission and adds no markup. You pay the pilot you hire, at the price the two of you agree.

Pilots who list thermal work

Real published profiles. Open any one to see credentials, kit, service area and sample work before you post.

Inspection pilots by state

Before you post

When can the survey be flown?

In the heating season, at night or several hours after sunset, in dry and still conditions, with the building heated and a sustained temperature difference of roughly ten degrees Celsius or more across the envelope. Outside those conditions the images are not diagnostic, whatever they look like.

Does it measure how much energy we are losing?

No. It shows where the envelope behaves differently from its surroundings. Quantifying loss needs a different exercise — modelling, metering or a blower-door test — and a report that converts thermal images into an energy figure is going well beyond what the data supports.

How much does it cost?

It scales with building size and the number of elevations, and with how much interpretation is included. Inspection quotes on SkyLog have ranged $100 to about $1,550 with a $300 median from 13 quotes across all inspection types; an interpreted envelope survey on a large building sits above that. Post the building for real numbers.

Is aerial better than a ground-level thermal survey?

It is better at coverage — upper floors, setbacks and roof interfaces that nobody can stand back from. A ground survey gets closer and can be combined with internal inspection and a blower-door test on the same visit. On a tall building the useful combination is usually both.

Do we need to do anything to the building first?

Heat it normally and keep it heated through the day before the survey — a building brought up to temperature an hour beforehand has not yet developed the differences the survey reads. Keep windows shut. Say if any area is unoccupied or unheated, because it will read as a fault otherwise.

Will this satisfy a grant or certification requirement?

Only if the scheme says so, and schemes differ on who must carry out the assessment and what evidence counts. Check the requirement before commissioning, and if a certified assessor must sign it, say so when you post.

From a job poster

The jobs nobody else would quote

“I was not expecting to have a response so quickly after calling countless different companies.”
Jared OlroydOwner, Specialty Cleaning Agents
Quote in under 2 hours

Post your thermal envelope survey free

Give the building size, the number of elevations and what the survey is for. Pilots with radiometric payloads quote directly.

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