For facilities, contractors & asset owners

Thermal Drone Inspection

Drone inspections from $175 near you

A stepped glass curtain-wall tower photographed against a clear sky
Straight-down view of a house roof among trees
Overhead view of a warehouse roof covered in solar panels
Transformer with red cooling fins inside a substation
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

What thermal actually finds

Four families of problem, and they are worth separating because they need different flights. Moisture: water trapped in roof insulation holds heat longer than dry material, so it glows after sunset. Electrical: loose connections, unbalanced phases and failing joints run hot under load, so the site has to be energised and ideally near peak demand. Building envelope: missing insulation, thermal bridging and air leakage show as patterns on a wall when there is a real temperature difference between inside and out. And solar: a cracked cell, a bypassed diode or a whole dead string reads clearly from the air, which is why utility-scale arrays are inspected this way as a matter of routine.

What it cannot do

It cannot see through walls, roofs or water — it sees the surface, and infers what is under it from how that surface behaves. It cannot measure how wet something is, only that a region is behaving differently from its neighbours. It struggles on wet, windy or strongly sunlit surfaces, because rain cools everything to the same temperature, wind strips the difference away, and direct sun loads a surface with reflected energy that has nothing to do with what is underneath. Shiny metal is close to unreadable without care, since low-emissivity surfaces mostly reflect the sky. A pilot who says none of this and promises to find your leak in any weather is selling certainty they do not have.

Scoping a thermal job so quotes are comparable

Say what you suspect and what the output is for — chasing a leak, closing a claim, supporting a grant application and building a maintenance baseline are four different jobs. Ask explicitly for radiometric files if anyone downstream needs to measure from them, because a set of screenshots cannot be re-analysed later. Say whether the site can be energised or occupied at the time of flight, since electrical and envelope work both depend on it. Agree the window: if the answer needs a post-sunset flight, that is a constrained slot and a weather-dependent one, and it is much cheaper to build a second attempt into the plan than to renegotiate it on the night.

Qualifications worth asking about

Anyone flying commercially in the US needs an FAA Part 107 certificate, and that is about the aircraft, not about the sensor. Thermography has its own training ladder — Level I and Level II certifications through bodies such as Infrared Training Center — and it is what separates a pilot who captures a good thermal image from one who can tell you what it means and put a defensible number in a report. If the deliverable is a report someone will act on, ask who is interpreting the data and what qualifies them to do it.

What this settles

  • Finds moisture trapped in roof insulation, which holds heat and glows in the hours after sunset.
  • Finds loose connections, unbalanced phases and failing joints on electrical gear — but only while it is energised and under load.
  • Shows missing insulation, thermal bridging and air leakage as patterns on a wall, given a real inside-to-outside temperature difference.
  • Reads cracked cells, bypassed diodes and dead strings across a solar array in a single pass.

What it does not

  • See through walls, roofs or water. It reads the surface and infers the rest from how that surface behaves.
  • Measure how wet something is — only that a region is behaving differently from its neighbours.
  • Work on wet, windy or strongly sunlit surfaces. Rain levels everything, wind strips the difference away, sun loads the surface with borrowed heat.
  • Read shiny metal reliably. Low-emissivity surfaces mostly reflect the sky back at the sensor.

A pilot who mentions none of this and promises to find your leak in any weather is selling certainty they do not have. Ask for radiometric files if anyone downstream needs to measure from them — screenshots cannot be re-analysed.

Why post it on SkyLog

Radiometric, not just colourful

A thermal JPEG is a picture of relative warmth. A radiometric capture stores a temperature for every pixel, so an analyst can measure a delta rather than guess at a hue. Anything feeding a report, a claim or an energy calculation needs the second kind — and it is a different payload, so it has to be asked for before the flight.

Timing decides the result

Thermal contrast comes from things heating and cooling at different rates. Most building and roof work is flown in the hours after sunset, when the structure gives back the day's heat unevenly. A midday flight on an overcast day can show almost nothing at all, and no amount of processing recovers it.

It narrows the search

Thermal tells you where to look, rarely what is wrong. A warm patch on a flat roof is trapped moisture, a leak, a design detail or a duct — the scan finds the anomaly in minutes and a person confirms it in one place instead of thirty.

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

How much does a thermal drone inspection cost?

Thermal is normally priced as a visual inspection plus a thermal premium rather than as its own rate — commonly $100 to $200 on top of a residential roof survey, and more where the deliverable is a radiometric report rather than images. Across all inspection work quoted on SkyLog to date, quotes have run from $100 to about $1,550 with a $300 median, though that spans every kind of inspection, not thermal alone. The honest answer for your job comes from posting it: scope, sensor and site drive the number more than any rate card does.

What is the difference between thermal and radiometric?

A thermal image shows relative warmth as colour. A radiometric image stores an actual temperature value per pixel, so someone can open it later and measure the difference between two points. If your report needs to state a delta, or if a third party will re-analyse the data, you need radiometric — and you need to say so before the flight, because it depends on the camera.

When should the flight happen?

For roofs and building envelopes, usually within a few hours after sunset, on a dry day with little wind and a real temperature difference between the structure and the air. For electrical work, when the system is under meaningful load. For solar, in high, stable irradiance — the opposite condition. There is no single good time; it depends on what you are looking for.

Can thermal find a leak in my roof?

It can often find where water is sitting in the roof build-up, which is usually near the failure but is not the same thing as the entry point. Water travels. Treat a thermal scan as the thing that tells a roofer where to open the roof up, not as a substitute for opening it.

Does thermal work through glass or walls?

No. Glass is effectively opaque to the wavelengths these cameras use, and a wall is read from its surface only. Anything described as seeing through a wall is describing the inference, not the measurement.

Do I need a certified thermographer?

For raw imagery, no. For a report that classifies severity or gets used in a claim, a warranty argument or an energy calculation, it is a fair thing to insist on — ask for Level I or Level II thermography certification and ask who is signing the interpretation.

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 inspection free

Say what you need scanned and what you suspect. Pilots with thermal payloads quote you directly, and we take no commission.

Overhead view of tiled rooftops in a dense town at golden hour