I borrowed an IR camera to look around the house. Its amazing waht these $400 cameras can see. In my old house, I can see vertical columns in the walls where the blown in insulation never reached.
I then looked indoors at the 2nd floor ceilings and could see some obvious cold spots. But the weirdest one was when I was in the basement looking around at the overhead wiring and circuits. You could see which wires were carrying current, they were bright white against the cold blue background.... but there was one nearly white hot spot on the floor above one area. I knew there was nothing there so I was worried about an unknown imbedded wire building up heat. It was a large spot about a foot in diameter. I went upstairs and found a cat. Amazing. The cat was on top of a 1/2" thick wool braided rug, on top of 3/8" of ceramic tile, on top of 3/4" plywood flooring, on top or 3/4" of tongue and groove decking. Almost 2.5" of solid material and yet he was as visible as if he was a light bulb! SO that's where all that cat food goes. Wasted heat. I also found the camera useful in troubleshooting electric circuits even in our tiny 4" cubesat. I could see where a short circuit was on a solar panel., etc Anyway, I'll probably buy one for retirement when I can no longer borrow this one. For those who haven't seen one, the image is live just like a TV camera. But the trick for really getting a good idea of energy loss is to point a scene and then lock the IR level. This lets you see everything relative to that fixed temperature. If you do not lock the levels, it re-adjusts every 2 seconds and so you can see everything in the one scene relative to itself, but not relative to any other scene, or fixed temperature. P.S. It will be ideal when spring comes and I start working on my EV conversion again. You can see temperature variations in wires that you could never sense with your fingers... Bob, Wb4APR -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20150124/7ed443fe/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
