With Airclip we can work through more than 600 systems a year without creating chaos.
Bauplanung Kleinert came to photovoltaics through structural engineering. Today the office plans systems on housing stock, maintains them and has written three apps of its own. The drone was not an improvement here, it was the precondition.
Source: Bauplanung Kleinert GmbH, pvplanung.com
“Being able to invite members is really good. That way our clients can work directly with the 3D model too.”
Managing director | Bauplanung Kleinert GmbH | Planning office for building applications, structural work and photovoltaics | Drones: DJI Mavic 3E
From building applications to photovoltaics
The office focuses on building applications, across Germany, mostly for house-building companies. In 2022 a contractor installing photovoltaics on housing stock was looking for a structural engineer. For a planning office with structural engineering of its own, that was a natural extension.
The structural work grew into the whole chain: surveying the buildings, planning the systems and, by now, maintaining them. The office built up every stage for it. The first colleague sat in the PV*SOL training two days after the job was agreed, three people in the office plan today; maintenance brought qualified electricians, measuring equipment and software of their own.
The equipment grew with the work. The first drone, a DJI Mini 4 Pro, was too small for buildings of that size: the first job, a 300 metre long apartment block in Dresden, took five battery changes. A Mavic 3E does the work now.
How a layout plan is made without a drone
Kleinert had other people show him how they arrive at their measurements. On a flat roof, a piece of cardboard the size of a module is laid out, paced off and moved along, for hours. On a pitched roof someone takes the straightest photo they can and then counts the roof tiles, because their width is known.
The first drone service he came across still worked with a scale reference in the image: it put a two metre pole on the ground and later scaled the photo to it. For Kleinert that was too much effort. A Google search then led him to the Airclip Cloud.
One working week
Two colleagues are on the road from Monday to Thursday. The flights are prepared in DJI FlightHub, including the systematic coverage of whole residential areas. Kleinert himself rarely goes out any more.
On Thursday evening the drone and the measuring equipment come back to the office. On Friday the cards are emptied: everything that is a survey goes straight into the Airclip Cloud, so the models are ready when the planning in PV*SOL starts on Monday. The thermal images from maintenance run into their own evaluation in parallel.
What the client gets out of it
Two or three people at the client now sit in the project as well, through user management. They look at the buildings themselves and measure what they need for the scaffold tower.
“Being able to invite members is really good. That way our clients can work directly with the 3D model too.”
Drone expertise behind the software
What Kleinert values about the partnership goes beyond the software. He has named contacts at Airclip, Marc Hüfken and Ricardo Kroll, who are available for questions about drone operations and who think along when his processes can be improved.
Behind the cloud there is also Airclip as a drone dealer, by its own account the largest in Germany in the solar sector. Getting the software and the knowledge about drones and operating processes from one source is what makes the big difference for him.