In a conversation with Jeff Carrillo from Structura View 
and Marvin Rosario from Airweb Digital , we broke down why expertise in data interpretation is just as crucial as the drone itself. Whether it’s spotting equipment failures, detecting anomalies, or assessing infrastructure health, having the right team to analyze thermal imagery makes all the difference.
Both Structura View and Airweb Digital provide not only just the flight but also the full-picture insights that help utilities and infrastructure teams make smarter decisions.
Marvin:
It’s something that anybody could just go out and hire a drone pilot with a thermal camera to be able to capture that data. Can they analyze it from there? Or do you need somebody that’s a little bit more qualified and specialized in looking at that data to make the right inferences off of it?
Jeff:
Okay. So let’s talk about science first, right? So thermal imaging simplified. All we’re doing is capturing an image. That’s documenting. temperature data. So let’s just compare two different materials. So we have the same material. So like insulation, that’s a dry, like same exact size as insulation that’s wet, fully saturated.
The wet one is going to be heavier. It’s going to have more mass, right? So during the day you got the sun beating down on the roof, everything’s heating up, getting hot, right? And then after the sun goes down, it starts to cool. So that dry one, because it has less mass is going to cool off at a much slower rate.
Then your wet insulation, and that’s what’s going to give you your temperature differential in those materials to reflect thermal anomalies that’s [00:01:00] suspected correlate with moisture, right? So that’s the science behind it. Now when thinking about hiring someone to help with this type of. Service. It’s if you’re going to get a report and you’re going to pursue this from any kind of legal standpoint, or you want to have really high confidence in what you’re doing, it’s important to have someone involved in the project who is a certified thermographer at an absolute bare minimum.
You have to have someone that understands thermography. You can’t just go out in the middle of the day and expect to get a positive result out of capturing thermal imaging on anything. Because, like, when the sun’s beating down on it, You’re going to get all kinds of anomalies. Everything’s going to be hot and just ridiculous, right?
You’re going to have reflection. There’s so many things to consider there. So making sure that the imaging is documented at just the right time. And what I mean, like just the right time, like you have to be dialed on some of these buildings. So like this 1. 2 million square foot roof, we had to go back out there three times because the roof was so big.
That we couldn’t document the entire thing in one pass, while our temperature window was still good. Those roofs reflect a lot of heat, they don’t absorb a lot of heat because they’re white. That’s just the nature of why we have them in Florida. And because of that, they cool off quickly.
Even the moisture areas cool off quickly. So you gotta catch them just right. Cause if you were there just ten minutes off, you would look at the roof and you wouldn’t see anything. But because we were there Just the right time we found 121 thermal anomalies. So that’s the importance of hiring someone who knows what they’re doing with this.
You could pay a lot of money, think there’s nothing wrong, and then a year later you realize I have all these leaks and this guy said there was nothing there. He may not have captured, he or she may not have captured the images in the right window to have actually seen any. So yes, it’s highly important to make sure that you’re working with someone who understands this and building science, etc.
