Deliverable
Solar Pre-Install Drone Site Surveys
A drone-based solar site survey built for installation companies: we fly the pre-install roof audit so your design team gets a CAD-ready outline and obstacle layout without sending a crew out with a ladder and tape measure.
What this means for you
A manual residential site survey typically runs 75–120 minutes and puts a technician on a ladder or the roof itself. A drone pass covers the same site in under 40 minutes, with zero climbing risk and no truck roll to schedule. What you get back isn't a resolution promise we can't back up without survey-grade RTK equipment — it's a precisely-placed, to-scale roof outline and obstacle layout, which is what a design tool actually needs to string a panel layout and calculate code setbacks.
What Gets Captured
Full-roof nadir and oblique capture in a single flight — every ridge, valley, eave, and pitch angle a design team needs for panel layout and setback calculations
Every rooftop obstruction (vents, chimneys, HVAC units, skylights, plumbing stacks) placed individually on the CAD overlay, not just outlined as a rough shape
Ground-context obstacle photos (tree canopy lines, nearby shading, and the electrical service panel/meter from the yard) captured the same visit
Delivered as a georeferenced GeoTIFF orthomosaic and a CAD-ready DXF roof outline your design team can drop into whatever software they already use — no re-measuring, no second site visit
Built for Every Scale of Installer
Residential Solar Installers
Skip the in-house site-audit truck roll. A single flat-rate flight replaces a 75–120 minute manual roof walk, with the CAD outline and obstacle layout back in your design queue the next day.
Commercial & Industrial Solar EPCs
Large flat roofs mean dense obstacle counts — every RTU, vent, and skylight needs an individual, precisely placed setback exclusion zone before a racking layout can be finalized.
Utility-Scale & Large Field Solar
Multi-acre ground-mount sites need topographic and grading data, not a roof outline. We capture it aerially and hand off raw geospatial data to your project's engineer of record — see below for how that works.
Flat-Rate Pricing
Priced to be a clear no-brainer against an in-house site audit — truck, gas, hourly wage, and liability included. Final pricing is confirmed in writing before scheduling.
| Property Type | Rate |
|---|---|
| Residential (single roof) | $225 flat per roof |
| Residential (batch of 5+ / month) | $175 per roof |
| Commercial, up to 50,000 sq ft | $975 flat |
| Commercial, 50,000–300,000 sq ft | $975–$1,425, scales with area |
| Commercial, 300,000+ sq ft | $1,425 + $0.00165/sq ft beyond 300,000 |
Commercial solar rates run above our standard orthomosaic pricing — solar racking layouts need every rooftop obstruction placed individually for setback compliance, which is more work than a general roof map. Optional add-on: a brief ground-level walk to photograph the attic/rafter framing or service panel in detail, quoted separately since it isn't part of the standard aerial-only flight. This table covers rooftop installs only — for ground-mount and utility-scale fields, see below.
Utility-Scale & Large Field Solar
Ground-mount arrays on multi-acre fields call for a different deliverable than a rooftop job: topographic and grading data for racking layout, not a roof outline. We fly the site and hand off raw geospatial data — a georeferenced orthomosaic (GeoTIFF) and a dense point cloud / digital surface model — directly to your project's civil engineer or surveyor of record, who produces the stamped grading and racking plan.
What this deliverable is — and isn't
Data provided by Maryland Drone Company for ground-mount and utility-scale sites represents aerial photogrammetric models, digital surface reconstructions, and raw geospatial data for your engineering team — not a finished grading or racking plan. These deliverables do not constitute an authoritative boundary or land survey under Title 15 of the Maryland Business Occupations and Professions Article and are not a substitute for work performed by a licensed Professional Land Surveyor (PLS) or Professional Engineer (PE).
Every Site Is Scoped Individually.
Tell us the acreage and location and we'll follow up with a written quote — no flat rate for ground-mount work.
Put Your Site Audits on Autopilot.
Tell us your typical monthly volume and service area, or call now with questions.
Works With Your Design Software
Files are delivered in standard, software-agnostic formats (GeoTIFF, DXF) that drop into whatever design platform your team already uses. If you run Scanifly, its drone-agnostic workflow takes our capture directly — any drone that produces geo-tagged imagery pairs with it. For other platforms, our CAD-ready roof outline and obstacle placement is built to be traced or imported straight into your existing design process.