Found this on a facebook pressure washing forum today…
They are taking over🤖
Yeah I talked to a company called Lucid that had soft wash drones out of curiosity. It was over $40,000 for one.
40k! I just about fell off my chair.
Imagine the possibilities though, water towers, 6 story buildings, basically everything other companies can’t touch. Charge a fortune.
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$40k, and you still have to have all the washing equipment in addition, from what I recall…
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Yeah… That’s $40k to START. You should see the cost of the spare parts, service plan, etc. on their website. You need to have a type of pilot’s license from the FAA, additional insurance, and be one of their guinea pigs to test it all out. I could see the cost for the first year of operation maybe climbing to twice the initial purchase price. Now I read something about them considering a rental option for around $3k/month, which would be a much more manageable cost structure.
The maximum height is 110 feet, which you could reach with a high class boom lift rental and not be limited to 15 minute flight times either. So it’s not like this drone is the only option.
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i was just going to mention this too, I don’t think a drone could lift much, Consider how much just 200ft of hose weighs, and filled with liquid?
My drone can’t even lift a single can of beer and deliver it to me on the porch.
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Now that’s totally worth it!
hey! it’s SCIENCE!!!
Wait, they don’t tether the power to the ground equipment? That seems highly impractical. I just figured that they had a power cord to go along with the chem hose.
Nope, they run on batteries. There is no way they could pull up 110 feet of heavy gauge wires to meet their requirements. A battery costs $430 and a charger costs $1200.
But you look so cool using it… 
Renting one for a week or a month so you can take your cool looking selfies and put them on your website sounds like an idea.
How many amps those motors pulling?
Seems like they could put an onboard AC to DC power supply, and feed it with 14ga AC extension cord. Probably end up weighing only a little more than it would with a battery.
Well, the batteries are 16Ah each, but the drone requires two of them for flight, so 32Ah. If we assume a usable capacity of 80% for lithium, that’s about 26Ah, or 1550Aminutes. That is good for 15 minutes run time, so a little more than 100A. Now we throw in an AC to DC converter at about 90% efficiency which brings us to 115A DC, or 12A AC at the drone.
You lose about 20% voltage per 100 feet wire, but we need at least 150 feet to get that drone 110 feet in the air and be able to move around, so let’s up our wire size to accommodate a 30% loss, which bumps our 12A to 16A. That is going to require a 12 gauge wire for our extension cord. The online hardware store tells me that’s about 19 pounds of cord. Can we assume an additional pound maybe for the power converter, housing, whatever wrap we are using to create this power/water umbilical, etc? I’m going to call it 20ish pounds versus the 9 pound battery weight.
That’s a huge difference and living on the theoretical/mathematical edge. If you start throwing in safety factors, peak versus average power consumption, typical real world conditions that cause losses, at least a small battery in case your power cord/generator fails so that your drone doesn’t become a 55 pound missile, etc. I think the lawyers and engineers say stick with the batteries. Maybe I’m wrong though.
I don’t really care though, I just want to play with one! 
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Thanks for doing the math!
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Can you imagine spraying bleach with a 40k drone 
Bleach seriously ruins everything 
