FLIR Home Energy Audit Tools

What tools do Home Energy Auditors and Home Inspectors use? Shopping for the right Home Energy Auditor or Home Inspector can be a timely process. Beyond their certifications and experience, you should also consider the types of tools they use to perform their tasks.

Here’s a video with Tom O’toole of FLIR Systems and Flemming Lund, a certified Energy Auditor & Home Inspector, talking about the tools used in the various phases involved in a home energy audit.

Analyzing Building Images Acquired at Different Times

A camera user writes:

"I find that images taken of the same structure, not much separated in time, sometimes look very different.  This poses a problem for me as I’m trying to compare the heat images of different houses (to detect homes that need weatherization).  Presently I’m not confident that images of two homes reflect actual differences in the structures, or are caused by minor environmental changes or even by artifacts in the photography.  Here is an example.

Attached are two nighttime images of the front of my house, which faces east.  IR0310 was taken at 10:40 PM, IR0408 at 11:11 PM. (The clock on the camera is two hours fast.)  It was a cold night with little temperature change over the half hour between pictures.  The house thermostat was constant. 

I've set the palette and temperature range to give me good differentiation of houses along the street.  I took the first image of my house as I began imaging houses on my street, and I took the second image when I finished the street scan. 

I am surprised, first, that my house looks so different in the two images. And second, that the outside looks warmer in the later image.  If anything, I'd have expected the outside to have cooled.

Glad for any interpretation of this.  Needless to say, with this kind of variation on a single house, it is hard to get good images for comparing houses. "

Thermography Weatherization Certification course earns BPI CEUs

The Weatherization certification course has been approved by BPI for 16 CEUS. It was previously approved by RESNET for 32 CEUS.

The 4 day certification course is intended to give the student a depth of the knowledge necessary to perform IR surveys of single or multifamily dwellings to identify weatherization issues. The class covers IR camera operation, and basic report generation, fundamentals of IR science and heat transfer principles. IR Weatherization surveys techniques, tips and tricks, and application examples.

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Tips to find moisture in wall cavities and insulation

"I'm looking for moisture in wall cavities and insulation, all in the interior of homes. I can't even see the studs let alone the screws."

To find moisture in building materials, the infrared camera must see a temperature difference on the surface being viewed: no temperature difference, no detection. The question is; under what conditions can a temperature difference due to moisture occur?

The most common scenario for moisture detection involves a temperature difference due to the evaporation of water from a surface. When water evaporates, the surface will become cooler. In order to evaporate well, the air dewpoint temperature should be lower than the air temperature, the lower the better.

If the relative humidity where you are trying to inspect is 90%, you are not going to get much evaporation, hence not much cooling, hence very low temperature differences that might not be spotted with your IR camera. In such a situation, use a dehumidifier in the room to lower the humidity (it also adds heat to the room which raises the temperature and also lowers the humidity as well).

Always confirm your readings with a moisture meter.

Wet insulation has a lower R value, or resistance to heat flow compared to dry insulation. So in situations where you have a temperature difference on either side of a wall, the wet insulation would allow heat to flow more easily, hence a thermal indication on the wall. Again, you need a temperature difference between both wall surfaces that has been there for several hours.

Will the wet areas appear hot or cold? That depends on the temperatures on the wall. For instance in the winter, where the inside is warmer than the exterior, you would expect to see a cool area when viewing from the interior. In the summer where the exterior wall temperature is higher than the interior, you would expect to see a warm area from the inside. Again, always confirm with a moisture meter, because there can be other reasons for hot or cold areas as well (like missing insulation, poorly fitted insulation, air leakage, heating ducts, etc.)