Widespan Greenhouse Cleaning By Drone - Is It Really Possible?

Thanks for watching. Here are links to the sites I mentioned in the video:

https://www.quadrotor.co.uk

https://www.dronesprayprecision.uk

https://www.harper-adams.ac.uk/course...

Cleaning wide-span greenhouses is not a popular job. In fact, most people refuse to even climb onto the roofs and who can blame them.

Widespan greenhouses give the grower the advantage of a much larger airspace, which the plants love, but their size can make cleaning them a real headache...

Pete and Kev, from Quadrotor professional drone services, had invited me long to observe a particularly challenging job they had won in West Sussex.

The team from Quadrotor were the first pilots to graduate from the drone spraying course run at Harper Adams University by the specialist team at Drone Spray Precision and are now the UK’s leading agricultural drone contracting company.

The job was at Toddington Nurseries, which boasts some of the UK’s most advance computerised glass in the industry, but they also have several legacy widespan greenhouses dating back to the late 1960’s.

And anyone who knows their greenhouses will understand, widespan glass can be a particularly tricky to clean and shade due to its steeply pitched roofs.

As you can see, it had been a while since they had been cleaned, and Quadrotor had been asked to use ReduClean to bring back its sparkle.

They were using their trusty XAG P40 drone which is a favourite in horticultural circles. The quick swap tank system means you get more time cleaning and less time filling.

The ReduClean was diluted 1 to 3 with water and applied at a rate of 600 litres per hectare.

While chatting to the site manager, he explained that it usually took at team 3 weeks to clean a greenhouse, but despite the extra complexities of the steeply pitched roof, Kev had the first one complete by lunch time and was confident he could complete 3 or 4 units in a good day.

And of course, all this had been done without anyone venturing onto the glass roof...