Drone technology has come a long way in the past few years, especially in the construction, maintenance, and inspection industries.
Building owners, contractors, and architects use drones to conduct quicker inspections at low costs and gather the most accurate data to make better decisions.
Recently, drones have also been used for facade inspections. The inspection of the exterior of your building is usually done after every few months.
Building Safety and Maintenance with Drone can helps identify structural defects, water leaks, wear, and other potentially hazardous elements that can affect the looks as well as the safety of your building.
With drones, you can quickly and easily inspect the facades of large buildings and skyscrapers without wasting your time and resources.
Why Use Drones for Facade Inspection?
Drones provide a cost-effective, quick, and safe façade inspection. Most building owners and construction companies prefer these over traditional means.
Traditional inspection methods require you to erect scaffoldings and outsource the equipment and personnel to assess the facade better. Doing all this makes inspections of the facade a very time-consuming process, potentially derailing the day-to-day operations inside the building.
With drones, you eliminate these issues and get better sharable data, flexibility, wider coverage, and very short inspection times.
Drone Façade Inspections Vs Traditional Inspection Methods
| Drone Facade Inspections | Traditional Inspection Methods | |
| Safety | Minimises risk to personnel as inspections are conducted remotely without physical access to the building facade. | Involves physical access to elevated areas involves risks to personnel due to falls, slips, or other accidents. |
| Efficiency | Rapid and time-saving as drones can cover large areas quickly and capture high-resolution images or videos for detailed analysis. | Time-consuming as inspectors need to manually access different areas of the facade, which may require scaffolding, ladders, or other equipment. |
| Cost-effectiveness | Reduces costs as drones eliminate the need for expensive equipment, such as scaffolding or cranes, and reduce labour costs. | Can be costly due to the need for specialised equipment, labour, and time-consuming processes. |
| Flexibility | Offers flexibility to navigate complex or hard-to-reach areas, such as roofs, corners, or facades, with limited accessibility. | Limited flexibility in accessing hard-to-reach areas or areas with safety hazards. |
Benefits of Facade Inspection for Building Safety and Maintenance with Drone
Drones allow building owners to save time and financial resources while conducting reliable and accurate exterior inspections. These inspections can be carried out without causing any disruption in your day-to-day business operations.
It increases your efficiency and allows you to enhance safety and maintain your building.
Here are some of the main benefits of using drone technology for the exterior inspection of your building:
- Cost-Effective Inspections
The building inspection done using drones does not require any extra preparation time, tools, or skills. There is no need to hire much labour to build scaffolding and inspect various parts of the facade separately.
This way, drones help you inspect with minimum costs. There is no need to assemble and reassemble the access equipment if you are using drones for inspection, allowing you to perform inspections frequently.
Drones help building owners get accurate and up-to-date data regarding their facade’s health and safety, preventing major damage to their property and saving repair costs.
- Remote Access
is among the most useful features of drone inspections, making them very popular in construction and other heavy machinery maintenance industries.
Drones make it easy to inspect buildings with very high roofs and complex designs. You don’t need to invest in specialised climbing gear, more skilled labourers, and safety tools if you conduct drone-based inspections.
Due to their small and compact size, drones can easily reach spaces that humans cannot reach without the help of expensive inspection tools.
- Efficient Imaging and Data Sharing
Drones used for surveys and inspection give you more coverage while taking videos, photos, and measurements. They can also take thermal images to highlight the abnormalities in the structure of buildings and heavy equipment.
The high-resolution cameras of these drones are sensitive to the smallest of details that reveal the current state of your building facade. The data gathered can be shared with the stakeholders in real-time using WIFI, Bluetooth, or cellular data.
- Saves Time
The inspection of the exterior of a building with traditional means requires you to set up heavy equipment, make safety arrangements, and gather data manually, which can be a really slow process.
The data gathered this way is unreliable and can lead to poor maintenance decisions.
Using drone technology, you can save a lot of your time since you don’t have to arrange for access equipment. Drones can cut down the evaluation time, and that helps you make maintenance decisions quickly.
- Enhanced Safety
There are many serious safety risks associated with the manual inspection of the building facade. If you inspect a very high building, you risk falling and getting injured.
With the help of drone technology, you don’t need to worry about any safety risks.
Drones eliminate the need for you to risk the safety of your workers, and they make it possible for you to conduct accurate and detailed inspections from a safe distance.
- Smooth Business Operation
If you use drones, you do not need to close the building and halt all operations to conduct inspections. Drone inspections are very quick, and that is why they can be done frequently.
It keeps you updated about the potential hazards that can destroy your building in the future.
Moreover, the preventive maintenance done after the drone surveys reduce the chances of damage that can interrupt the activities inside the building. It keeps your operations running smoothly and boosts your productivity.
Conclusion
Traditional methods for facade inspection are slower, less accurate, and more expensive, making regular inspections quite a nuisance.
The drone inspections eliminate all these concerns and help businesses plan future repairs and prevent potential damage.
This is why architects, contractors, engineers, and other teams involved in building construction and maintenance increasingly lean toward using drones for inspections.
GIS Drones has a team of professional pilots adept at conducting aerial façade inspections. Get in touch with us to discuss your façade inspection project.
