OnSight Technology, a manufacturer of autonomous robots for the solar industry, has added an autonomous fire, smoke and heat detection system for rooftop and remote-location solar arrays.
OnSight uses off-the-shelf components like cameras and sensors tied to its own software and artificial intelligence to build the football-sized Owl fire and smoke detector.
“The risk of a rooftop fire is that the first person to discover it is often somebody from the ground looking up, and by that time that happens, the fire can go from small to catastrophic structure fire,” said Jeff Struhm, spokesman for OnSight.
The Owl system joins the Bulldog, Onsight’s first product that is a ground-crawling robot that uses artificial intelligence vision to inspect solar arrays in remote locations.
For the Owl, the company trains algorithmic models to identify smoke and heat signatures in much the same way the company trains its solar-panel inspection robots to identify heat signatures and cold spots when it inspects photovoltaic arrays in remote locations.
The company is currently sold out of both Bulldogs and Owls, Struhm said.
“We don’t have anything in stock. We are building them and shipping them as fast as we make them,” Struhm said.
The insurance claims for solar-ignited fires are increasing to the point where insurers are offering reduced premiums for companies that install fire prevention devices, he said. That is making the sales of Owls more attractive because their return on investment is less than a year just on reduced insurance cost.
The Owls are generally set up on poles 20 feet in the air, and the camera technology allows a user to stream what the Owl camera sees in real time. That allows an owner to know exactly what is happening during an emergency. It also allows the user to initiate a system shutdown remotely or autonomously, depending on how the system is integrated.
Solar array fires are an increasing problem as more solar arrays are being installed, Struhm said.
It’s generally not the panels that catch fire. Rather it's the wire connections at the panels, at the inverter or in harnesses. In a utility-scale array, there are hundreds of thousands of connections that are electrified, he said. Many of them are cables and connections that were assembled in the field, and that is where human error in a crimp connection can eventually lead to something like a heat event or a bad ground that sparks fire.
“There are a lot of things that can go wrong,” Struhm said.
About half of the Owls are deployed at utility-scale solar arrays and the other half are rooftop deployments of solar arrays.
The company declined to say how many Bulldogs or Owls it's deployed, and the company does not disclose its annual revenue, Struhm said.
The company leases the system, or it will sell them with an ongoing subscription for software costs, said CEO Derek Chase. He declined to specifically identify any customers, but said they include some big-box stores and a company with a lot of warehouses.
Four cameras mounted on poles can cover a full 360-degree view for about 500 meters.
They can be wired into the building, and they can also be wired to work off grid using their own solar panel. Additionally, they can be connected directly to communication networks at the site, and they can also be connected via cellular networks.
OnSight is a 2022 startup that now has about 20 employees. It recently leased about a third of a 35,000-square-foot building at 140 Blue Ravine Road in Folsom.
