so ive been doing roofing work for about 12 years and one of my guys mentioned we should look into getting a drone for inspections, specifically for the commercial flat roof jobs where we're doing 40,000+ sq ft warehouses and stuff. right now we're sending guys up there every single time just to do the initial assessment which honestly is a huge liability issue and takes forever.

i looked at the Mavic 3 Enterprise and the Autel Evo II Pro but honestly not sure if the thermal option is actually worth it for what we do or if just high res RGB is good enough for finding ponding water issues, membrane damage, that kind of stuff. the price jump for thermal is significant and i cant justify it to my boss without a real answer.

anyone actually using drones in a roofing or commercial property context? is the 107 cert a pain to get or is it pretty manageable if youre not already a pilot

part 107 is totally manageable, took me about 3 weeks of studying with the Sheppard Air app and passed first try. the test itself is mostly airspace stuff and weather, not drone-specific. you'll need it if you're doing this commercially so dont skip it.

on the thermal question ? honestly for roofing specifically thermal is kind of a game changer. RGB alone will show you obvious damage but moisture trapped under a membrane doesn't always show up visually, especially on TPO or EPDM roofs. thermal after sunset when the roof is cooling down will light up wet insulation like crazy. had a job last fall where we found three separate moisture intrusion areas on a warehouse that the client had no idea about. that saved them probably 60k in damage if it had gone another winter.

if budget is tight the Mavic 3T is a solid entry point but the radiometric JPEG output takes some getting used to in post. i use FLIR Tools and then bring it into a report template we built in Word, nothing fancy but it works.

we do something similar for commercial property management clients and honestly the drone paid for itself within like 4 months just in time saved not sending crews up. our guys were spending half a day on initial assessments sometimes. now its like 45 mins of flight and a couple hours putting the report together.

we dont have thermal and manage fine but we mostly do visual condition reports not active leak investigation so depends on what exactly youre promising the client i guess