UKH

Just received thermal Camera on a seven day free loan from energy company it shows up a few spots that are seeping a bit of heat away, seems a great idea to check how effective your insulation is or isn't.

Turn your heating off for a few days - the camera will show your insulation doing a 100% perfect job then :P

I believe these are pretty expensive. Does sound like a great idea.

I got a ticking off for borrowing a thermal camera to wander round the local park at night looking for bats. It did cost £40k (and that's not the most expensive)

Which energy company was this? 

Can you please take some photos of yourself wearing different winter jackets, just for fun?

Octopus energy, if anyone wants a referral code to save £50 just mail me I know it's cheeky but they are a very good company with 100% green energy, and great customer support.

The price varies massively. I have 2, one made by Flicker that cost about £150,  one made by Fluke that was £600, a guy I know started with them checking out industrial electrical panels and spent £3 grand and now he uses a £10k camera to assist his wife doing physiotherapy to injured horses. As hang about said the one he used was £40k and the price can go a long way north of that. 

The one they lent me is an FLIR one pro so about £400 apparently they have 200 to lend out to customers

Such a brilliant idea. Hopefully, people won't abuse it and it will be continued.

How does it work, can you take still images in say a JPEG format to use as a reference for points of heat seepage or it is just a live image and you just need to make a mental or written note?

The camera connects to a mobile phone so either still images or video storage.

Different colour separation for heat loss, it's quite accurate as you can see battens in stud walls and lintels above windows.

I’ve got a Seek Compact - cheaper and higher respite on than the FLiR One.  It can see battens etc, but that doesn’t mean it’s “accurate” - it’s a few oC off in the temperature it assigns everything, but it spots small temperature differences well - high precision, low accuracy.

If it's anything like mine you might need to tune the settings to the thing you are looking at. I think the term is emissivity, basically how reflective the thing you are looking at is. 

I’ve got a Pulsar thermal spotter and I’ve spent quite some time looking at the outside of my house and working out where heat leaks (and being in awe at how hot my chimney was!) 

I’ve also spent a drunken evening with mates trying in vain to spot our farts with it (didn’t see any, witnessed a shart in the process though). 

A somewhat convoluted string of events ended up with me taking a £40k thermal camera home from uni for a couple of evenings.

Spent a lot of time imaging the cats' footprints as they walked across the floor (visible for a good 10-20 seconds) and my own heat reflection from walls and windows. Great fun.

Also, my flat leaks LOADS of heat, but I knew that anyway.

Yup; getting accurate values of that for anything vaguely real world is a big limiting factor in absolute accuracy - but that doesn’t limit the usefulness of the cameras for looking at heat or cold leakage, hotspots on equipment and so on.  I don’t think my Seek camera has any settings for this but can’t check now as I don’t have it to hand.

What blows me away is the evolution of technology to make this - microbolometer arrays are insane; the idea that every pixel is a moving part working like a bimetallic strip from school - the appearance of affordable lenses in thermal wavelengths.  

Exactly. I use mine for comparison purposes, it shows hot and cold spots on coolers indicating where cleaning is needed, hot spots on cylinder heads indicating a failed valve and hotter than they should be bearings. For me it's more about looking for inconsistencies than actual numbers.