We used to count roof tiles and walk industrial roofs for hours
solmotion project installs photovoltaics on everything from a family home to a commercial hall. Roof measurements here used to come from counted tiles. Today the sales team brings them back from the first visit.
Source: solmotion project GmbH, solmotion.de
“Our planning process is far more reliable now. You upload the images once and then you can do clean planning.”
Technical planner | solmotion project GmbH | Photovoltaics for homes, commercial buildings and ground-mounted sites | Drones: DJI Mini 4 Pro, DJI Mavic 3E
A company that lives off its sales team
solmotion project plans and builds photovoltaic systems, on family homes as well as commercial halls, and occasionally on ground-mounted sites. More than 100 employees, and more enquiries than can be worked through one by one in any depth.
“We are a sales-driven company. We get an enormous number of enquiries, and handling every one of them in depth would not be economical or practical.”
Manuel Madlener works in technical planning. He used to prepare quotes and plans for homes himself, mostly in PV*SOL, and he saw the first drone projects through. Today the cloud is used by the project managers and by the sales team.
How a roof measurement used to happen
For a home, measuring up began with a photo. The tile was identified, its width looked up, then the tiles were counted. Dormers, chimneys and everything else on the roof were measured by the same tile width and then rebuilt by hand in PV*SOL.
“Counting tiles, measuring everything on the roof that way and then copying it into PV*SOL by hand. Yes, that was grim.”
The quicker option was to draw straight onto the map. On a pitched roof that view is distorted enough that small roofs came out 30 percent off. So the tiles were counted, even at the quotation stage.
On commercial buildings it worked the other way round: the quote was planned off the satellite map, and project management later walked the roof with a folding rule. Whatever was missed only surfaced once nobody was on site any more. Complicated roofs, where every dome and every chimney had to be in the right place, went to an external service as a CAD survey.
The sales team brings the roof back with them
solmotion started in the residential business, at first during the quotation stage: it was good to see how a customer reacts when the quote already shows their own roof. Today the recording happens once the order is in, to keep everything before that leaner.
The sales people in the field are equipped with drones for it and record the roof during the site visit. One battery is enough for a roof, and after about 20 minutes the building is captured.
“Our planning process is far more reliable now. You upload the images once and then you can do clean planning.”
Project management takes it from there, working on with the orthophoto and the 3D model. The CAD drawings are now done in house.
On commercial roofs the project manager flies
On commercial buildings the drone sits with the project manager, one with RTK. Every building whose roof has to be measured gets flown, which means everywhere there is no architect’s plan to work from.
“Even new builds often get flown. You see things that are not in any plan.”
Two things come out of the data at once. In CAD the orthophoto sits under the module layout. The 3D model carries the cable routing: where the run comes down off the roof, where it goes from there, where the inverter sits.
What Airclip contributes
The photos from one drone flight become a dimensionally accurate orthophoto and a 3D model that carry straight on into PV*SOL and CAD.