Open Drain more like, it is Belgium after all

Taken lots of pics: didn't find anything dreadful. Did find what I take to be thermal bridging in corners, and at joists and fixings (especially the steel screws holding up our aerogel plasterboard), and why condensing boilers are a better idea than not (flue at ~80C)!

Putting them up now but it will take a while for them to become visible.

Rgds

Damon

PS. Raw images will be appearing starting here in the next hour or so (I'll annotate them later): http://gallery.hd.org/_c/natural-science/_more2011/_more02/thermal-imaging-of-house-interior-and-exterior-and-nearby-on-chilly-February-evening-about-6C-ambient-with-Flir-Systems-b40-in-Kingston-London-England-1-DHD.jpg.html

PPS. Fixed typo in name thus it will be a while before the images are republished!

What area do you cover, buckyp?

Yes, that's not too far from me about an hour or so away. We've got a few cold evenings coming up so possibly quite soon!

Hi Tony, Reading's just down the road from me, I'm in Oxfordshire so only half an hour or so away, if you're interested, contact me through my web site.
www.sustainablelifestyles.co.uk

I got an i-Pad for Christmas

It has a very impressive inbuilt infra red camera

I wish I knew how to make it take photos.

At the moment all my window are red from inside as they are capturing solar energy I cant see any thermal bridges or cold spots apart from my window frames are cooler than the rest of the interior of my house.

Spoilsport.

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: SteamyTea</cite>iPad may be different, there is a similar one that runs Google's OS for less than 100 quid.

But purely out of interest, is there a USB IR camera that is cheap and good enough, if it worked with Linux even better</blockquote>

You can make a cheap USB camera into an IR camera, although the performance isn't great and I have no idea what sort of wavelengths it responds to. Take it apart, remove the lens assembly from the sensor then remove the IR filter that will be between the lens and the filter (often a thin bit of plastic). Reassemble the camera and it will now see IR reasonably well.

You can only use it at night, with no light, but I keep meaning to try covering the lens with a bit of black bin liner to see if that would allow it to work in daylight (bin liner is fairly transparent to IR, apparently).

I believe there is better advice on doing this mod on the web, as I tried it a couple of years ago after being sent a link, perhaps to one of those US "how to hack things" sites.

Car reversing cameras are also IR sensitive, or at least the one on my last car was, as it had a ring of IR LEDs around the lens to provide night time illumination. The picture at night wasn't great, and was black and white, but it did definitely see reasonable well with just a dozen or so IR LEDs lighting up the few feet behind the car. It worked a lot better with the reversing light on though!

CCD and CMOS Camera sensors work aroun 400 to 700nm (nano metres).
If you remove the IR filter (small piece of coated glass) you may get them to work out to around 900nm.

Thermal imaging is long-wave IR, at around 10 um (Ten micro metres, ie. 10,000 nm).

Out by a factor of ten-ish I'm afraid. The term "IR" is pretty broad.

I removed the filters from a couple of cheap (£50) visible light cameras and have them in our chicken house for night vision webcams (it's great - better than a lot of TV) but they wouldn't work without infra-red illuminators in there.

You going to get one Steve, then I can pop over and borrow it

Is the resolution very important? The video on the Flir website seems to show enough definition to find the cold spots and the photo image combined with the thermal picture looks to make interpretation far more simple.

The price seems to be around £670 (inc VAT) which is OK but most house owners will only use it a couple of times (and then it will end up on the shelf next to my Black and Decker non-contact thermometer!), so I can't see myself buying one just yet - sorry ST

I was going to post a similar question to this. I am looking to write a bid for a Thermal camera and laptop with a view to mapping the streets of the town over winter.

I was looking for a reasonable priced unit that could do this and be used for more detailed work as our experience grows. The idea would be to identify houses that are really poorly insulated, you know, the ones where the snow melts off their roofs days before their neighbours do.

As a Transition group we would use the image as an invitation to engage and hopefully save the householder money.

Is there a preferred temperature range at which to take the images?

Best regards

Darren

You would have to comply with all the data security and protection acts. Not hard to do, but you need to do it.

Might've missed this, but the temperature range inside the house is also important, you can't compare houses easily if you don't know they are heated to the same internal temperature. Although I suppose you can get the general idea.

External temp no higher than 5C ideally but it will still work if not, just harder to spot differences. Ideally done when overcast because of reflected radiative effect of sun.