Winter is coming. Which means so are your bills.
Homes all over the UK will be turning up radiators, super glueing windows shut, shoving on jumpers, filling hot water bottles and piling up blankets.
There’s no doubt winter can be fun. Sledging, woolly scarves, snow days, snow flakes, snow ball fights, snow. And of course there’s that little thing called Christmas just around the corner too. That really expensive little thing.
The last needed on top of all that fun and expense are heating bills longer than your list for Santa.
Houses can leak heat. Even the most well insulated house can have gaps, meaning you loose energy and money.
An infrared camera is a good way to identify those gaps to fix and insulate them. You can pin point exactly where you’re loosing heat in the house so you know where to start, because unless you have the roof missing, those gaps might just be a little sneaky and not where you might expect.
How do these cameras work? The thermal infrared images allow you see where heat is and how it is being distributed. All heat is just energy, the camera detects infrared energy and turns it in to an image of different colours by calculating the temperature. These are called false colours. Darker blues show where something is colder while red and white like colours show when something is hotter. Spaces like attic doors, the space under the bath are two examples of leaks that you wouldn’t normally think of as an area to be insulated. Even your windows, an infrared can’t go through glass, but you can see how well your frames are doing (a good tip is that metal is a much better conductor of heat than plastic or wood. Something to test with your new camera…)
While it’s tempting to take an infrared selfie, it’s a better idea to spend some time (a couple of hours should cover the whole house) pointing the camera at your walls and floors to see if that insulation you spent time and money putting in is actually doing it’s job.
Identifying these root causes of heat loss means you know what to tell a contractor or inspector, allowing them to then visualise and advise you on the best treatments.
With winter already being an expensive season, it makes sense to cut some bills short.
https://letsfixit.co.uk/138381/how-to-use-infrared-cameras-to-detect-heating-leaks/