First thermal camera, for house examination

[AllenB]

Hi All,

I’ve got an old, leaky house in the Chicago suburbs. It’s a wonderful home, but… could use some tightening up, what with our winters (can reach -30C occasionally) and rising natural gas prices.

I’ve been thinking occasionally of a thermal camera for a while but only recently discovered this corner of EEVblog. Searching turns up some discussion of home insulation, etc, but I haven’t found anything too specific. I’ve got a decent electronics and software background, but know essentially nothing about this subject.

Is there anything already written that might point me in useful directions? Or barring that, I would appreciate any hints about reasonably affordable cameras that might work well. I don’t mind hacking around, of course; that’s half the fun.

Thanks,
Allen

[james_s]

If you just want to evaluate your own house, you might consider hiring a professional home inspector. They are experts at doing exactly what you want, I know someone who does it for a living and he has a thermal camera that he uses for just what you're talking about doing.

[AllenB]

Oh, this is more about the journey than the destination, if you will. I should have been clearer. Yes, I do want to tighten up the house, but what better excuse to get my hands on a new toy?

[james_s]

Well the one my friend is currently using is a Flir C5. I am not an expert when it comes to thermal cameras but I know he's been happy with that one and I've played with it a few times and found it to work well.

[DaJMasta]

A lot of the cameras available will be good for this task - normal fixed lenses will be designed for mid to long range focus, and even non radiometric imagers (a thermal image, but not a temperature readout) and low resolution/framerate cameras will still give you good identification of problem spots.  The tier up of available cameras will probably have manual focus lenses (look at datasheet specs for near focus distance if up close work is important to you), and if you were wondering, auto focus is not really a thing in thermal cameras.

You will probably end up with a 9Hz update rate on the thermal core, as they aren't export restricted, but you want to look for something with a reasonable thermal sensor resolution for the price (sometimes they advertise screen resolution and hide it in a spec sheet), and something that produces good looking images (looking them up here or elsewhere should give you an idea).  A lot of the similar price class units available use the same core, so you can expect some degree of performance parity among competing products in some cases, so looking for additional features could help set one apart.  FLIR has things like MSX (other brands have to call it something else), that basically takes edge data from a visible light camera and adds it to the thermal image to give you a sort of enhanced resolution, and especially with lower resolution sensors, it can be handy to keep your landmarks straight when looking at the image.  You probably want a handheld unit with controls, unless you think a phone dongle fits your use case, but a standalone thermal core could conceivably do the same job.

[thermalengineer]

For home inspection, there are lots of plug-in devices suitable for this. Flir has things like flir one, InfiRay has P2/T2S+.  I bought 1 of this.  It's such a handy little thermal cam. I am just trying to figure out how to coonect those thermal cameras to a PC or a laptop and see how they are recognized by them.

[Bill W]

Infiray P2 or P2 pro and T2s is the answer.

 
No it is not - the OP has stated that phone - attached is undesirable.
Do you not know your own product range at Infiray sales ?