Check this out, pretty cool: Thermal Imaging

[Novicaine]

When I put the pex in for my in-floor heat, I left areas with no pex for the columns for my two post that I planned on.

But when they cut the expansion joints for the concrete they went right where the posts will be, so I had to move things around to be sure all bolts were 6" from a joint, and I wanted to make sure that I didn't move far enough to hit pex.

So, luckily, we know a guy who loaned us his handheld FLIR thing.

We turned the heat off for about 24 hours, then cranked it on high, and after 20 minutes maybe, we could easily see the tubes, and could tell the post positioning was safely away from pex. We could use the laser pointer on the handheld gun to trace the lines and mark them. We verified accuracy by placing an ice cube on the mark and it lined up.

My tubes are at the bottom of my 4" slab... we were worried they wouldn't show up clear.

Here's the pictures, with the tubes before concrete and the flir images. The rectangle in one of the pictures is the lift column laying on the floor.

 

[Zick]

Love the pictures. Been dying to try this with our floors, my father in-law has a thermal gun that I can borrow.

 

[CARS]

Thanks for posting the pics. We have one for the Fire Dept. but it's a Black & White image. (when you only have 7 calls a year, it's hard to get the $$ to upgrade the equipment )

When I anchored my paint booth down I checked to see if there was going to be "trouble spots".

You can really see all of your insulation/heating/cooling issues with an imaging camera. It's fun to drive around and look at other peoples homes in winter too. Brick homes are especially "loose".

 

[cowboyjosh]

my electrical contracting business has thermal cameras for preventative maintenance, to check for hot connections, etc. I used the camera on both of my houses and to my horror discovered in the 1 house, I had a dimmer that was getting way hot, somehow too many recessed halogen cans ended up on a 600 watt dimmer, had to bump up to a 1000 watt dimmer.

Its also cool with thermal cameras to look at the hot and cold spots in your house, but don't look too much otherwise it'll just piss you off.

 

[rburke65]

We used a thermal imaging camera at General Motors of the same thing....looking for hot spots on a wide variety of electrical items. It was a very usefull tool for finding trouble before it bit you on your ****.

 

[Catalyze]

Very nice photos and good thinking to use the technology to solve a potential problem area.
Craig

 

[Kevin54]

On using them on your house, most Co-op electric companies will do a free energy audit on your home. They went all around with the FLIR camera to show the hot and cold spots in the house. I'll have to see if I can find the pics. I would have never thought to use one on a floor though to find where your PEX is at.

 

[Cast Iron Nuts]

Hey im impressed man could I find uses for that hahahaha like pointing it at the wife to see if she is in the mood. Sry too cold up here and cant work in the garage.

 

[TurnipTruck]

I've posted this before, but it's still fascinating:

Six years after initially posting these I just noticed in this shot that I ran one loop backwards, causing it to have a 3*F cooler exit than the rest of the loops!

You can use these cameras to see an impending heart attack(one half of the face will be cooler than the other), propane tank levels, watch people walk by on the other side of a wood slat fence, see if your TV remote is working, track people by their footprints, see what they touched 5 minutes later, look for loose electrical connections... One evening of borrowing this camera from work was not enough!

 

[Novicaine]

Six years after initially posting these I just noticed in this shot that I ran one loop backwards, causing it to have a 3*F cooler exit than the rest of the loops!

I didn't think direction of the loops mattered? I just stuck one end of each pex in each manifold? Do I need to rethink that? (Actually I doubt I have enough length to switch them).

 

[TurnipTruck]

I didn't think direction of the loops mattered? I just stuck one end of each pex in each manifold? Do I need to rethink that? (Actually I doubt I have enough length to switch them).

The loops need to hit the perimeter first. You can see the lefthand edge is
colder than the area 2 feet farther in.

I did notice that entire corner lost its "dew" last upon initial warmup.

 

[ddawg16]

I'm used to seeing FLIR images like the below.....warning....ending is not pretty....

San Diego Police Chase on FLIR

 

[wssix99]

Thanks. This is really interesting and I something I will look at as I finalize the radiant design on our new house.

BTW - The Taliban recently posted this image on one of their web sites in an effort to ruin Christmas: (The technology is turning on us.)
View media item 8024

 

[warhead]

Nice pics.
There is this military company in Israel making thermal imaging cameras for flying drones and crawling bots. I got to visit them to install new intranet server, so they let me check out they wicked thermal visuals from the real time pseudo-terrorist hunting drone. Amazing stuff.