so ive been doing roofing estimates for about 8 years and a buddy of mine keeps telling me to just get a drone and stop climbing up on every single commercial flat roof we quote. were talking big box stores, warehouses, that kind of thing. some of these roofs you genuinely dont want to walk if you can help it, either its a liability thing or the membrane is old and sketchy.

i picked up a Mavic 3 Enterprise a few months back and honestly the thermal add-on has been a game changer for finding moisture intrusion. you can see wet insulation under TPO like its nothing when the conditions are right, usually a couple hours after sunset works best in my experience. the issue im running into is clients dont always trust the data. like i show them a thermal overlay and they look at me like i just showed them a abstract painting or something.

anyone else doing this commercially? curious what you use for reporting software because right now im just screenshotting stuff and throwing it in a Word doc which i know is terrible but it works for now. also wondering if the Part 107 is really necessary or if anyone flies under the recreational exception for this kind of work ? i already know the answer probably but just asking

yeah Part 107 is absolutely necessary for commercial work, no gray area there. flying for compensation or hire means recreational exception is out the window. not trying to lecture you, just dont want to see you get hit with an FAA violation on top of running a business.

on the reporting side ive been using Pix4D for a while but honestly for basic roofing stuff DroneDeploy is way easier to hand a client something that looks professional. you can generate an orthomosaic with annotations and the clients actually understand what theyre looking at instead of just raw thermal screenshots. the thermal interpretation thing is real though ? i usually include a quick legend and write a plain english summary of what the colors mean otherwise nobody knows what theyre looking at.

we do cell tower and rooftop HVAC inspections and switched to the Matrice 30T last year. overkill for roofing maybe but the zoom on that thing is insane for documenting flashing details and penetrations without having to get right on top of everything. thermal + zoom in one payload is just really useful when youre writing up a condition report. the software question is the real bottleneck honestly, everyone has a different workflow