This study examines a deep learning and feature‐based approach for the purpose of detecting and classifying defective photovoltaic modules using thermal infrared images in a South African setting. The VGG‐16 and MobileNet models are shown to provide good performance for the classification of defects. The scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) descriptor, combined with a random forest classifier, is used to identify defective photovoltaic modules. The implementation of this approach has potential for cost reduction in defect classification over current methods.