One of the things a lot of people fail to realize is that air movement is the biggest way heat moves in and out of your house. It doesn’t matter how much insulation you have or how efficient of windows you have if the heat is just catching a free ride on some moving air and totally bypassing your fancy windows/doors/insulation. There’s a lot of good ways to look for such problems, foremost of which is a Blower Door test and some work with a smoke source. However, the cost of the Blower Door setup is a little out of the reach for the average casual homeowner, so another way to look at it is through thermal imaging. Home Depot rents IR cameras in some parts of the country but not around here. A few years ago, a company called FLiR came out with The FLiR ONE, a camera that attached to an iPhone but it was still kind of expensive. This year, they came up with an upgrade with twice the resolution and a way lower price. After months of being on backorder, mine finally arrived last week.
We’ve been working on an assay of our house to try to find specific issues to correct and I thought maybe some of you might be interested enough to want to look at some of the pictures as well. With the color scheme I’m using on the camera, white and yellows are hottest, oranges and light purples are moderate, and dark purples and blacks are coldest.
This first picture is from outdoors showing our back door. Since we’re outside and it’s cold, you want everything you’re looking at to be as cold as possible (since warm things outside means heat leaking out of the house).
The large black area is the little porch. It’s exposed to air on all sides and the upper surface is exposed to the sky (meaning the porch radiates energy towards the sky but the sky doesn’t radiate any back). You can see that the sides of the porch are slightly warmer because they can “see” the ground so they’re getting some radiation “back” from the ground. The crosshairs are centered on the back door, which is doing OK in the middle of the panel but not very well around the edges. We had to scratch our heads about this one for a while. We think it’s because it’s a steel-clad door. The steel face of the door wraps around the edge of the door past the weather seal, meaning that the edge of the steel is exposed to the inside air. The metal is functioning as a thermal bridge, allowing heat to flow out of the house. You can see the effect is even worse near the deadbolt and door knob. Additionally you can see that the glass (bright white square at the top) is leaking massive amounts of heat because it’s not low-E glass and it’s letting the stuff inside the house radiate heat right through the glass. We might put something over the glass because of this. I’m also wondering why we have some hot spots along that diagonal seam towards the left side of the picture!
This picture shows the crushed stone landscaping (cold texture at the bottom), the shingles, and the small amount of foundation exposed above grade. What’s the super-hot stripe in the foundation? Don’t know, but it definitely needs found and fixed!
This one shows the side/roof on the north side of the house. What’s with that serious hot spot (right underneath the reticle)? Definitely losing some energy there.
The black rectangle is a window with low-E glass in it. Because of the coating on the glass, you can’t see the hot interior. Instead, what you see is outer space (very cold) reflected in the window. Look carefully at the upper corners. What’s with those two hot flares? This is a casement window and, based on looking at some of other identical windows up close, I think the weatherstripping that the window shuts against might be failed. Of course, that ignores the elephant in the room: the HUGE hot spot up under the eaves! No idea how that’s happening but I bet it costs us a fortune!
This is the same type of casement window, but down at ground level, and a double rather than a single. Note how you can actually see the heat flaring out the top of the right hand side. The window is leaking so much air that the hot air rises up the side of the house and heats the wood siding directly above the window. Again, I think this is a failure of the weatherstripping the window shuts against but we’ll have to experiment to be sure.
This is the underside of a balcony hanging off the master bedroom. Note the massive heat leak beside the deck joist where it (presumably) passes into the house. We’ll have to fix this one too.
ATTACH]168118[/ATTACH]
Finally, here’s one from inside the garage (underneath the main level of the house). There’s a lot going on here. At the far left edge, you can see that the panels of the garage door are pretty cold because they’re not well insulated. You can also see that the glass (two cold rectangles, right-ish side of picture) are quite cold because they aren’t low-E glass either. You can also see some cold lines around the where the door shuts, indicating there’s energy loss somehow. We’ll test it with a smoke stick later. However, the real issue is that hot mess at the top! the large orange and purple rectangle coming in from the left is the main duct trunk from the furnace that feeds the registers in the Great Room. Above the right edge of the door is one of the registers. Connecting the trunk to the register is a section of flex duct. It’s leaking like mad. The white-hot line shows a major leak where the flex ties into the trunk. The flex is also leaking somewhere else, though, as you can see a hot spot on the upper left corner of the door due to hot air blowing on it from the leak. Now, this is all in the garage, which isn’t supposed to be heated. So every bit of furnace air that leaks into this space is wasted money because it’s not heating any place that we want heated.
I have dozens more, but really they’re uninteresting to anyone who isn’t working on this house. I just thought some of you guys might be interested in the kind of stuff you can find and fix with a camera like this.
We’ve been working on an assay of our house to try to find specific issues to correct and I thought maybe some of you might be interested enough to want to look at some of the pictures as well. With the color scheme I’m using on the camera, white and yellows are hottest, oranges and light purples are moderate, and dark purples and blacks are coldest.
This first picture is from outdoors showing our back door. Since we’re outside and it’s cold, you want everything you’re looking at to be as cold as possible (since warm things outside means heat leaking out of the house).
The large black area is the little porch. It’s exposed to air on all sides and the upper surface is exposed to the sky (meaning the porch radiates energy towards the sky but the sky doesn’t radiate any back). You can see that the sides of the porch are slightly warmer because they can “see” the ground so they’re getting some radiation “back” from the ground. The crosshairs are centered on the back door, which is doing OK in the middle of the panel but not very well around the edges. We had to scratch our heads about this one for a while. We think it’s because it’s a steel-clad door. The steel face of the door wraps around the edge of the door past the weather seal, meaning that the edge of the steel is exposed to the inside air. The metal is functioning as a thermal bridge, allowing heat to flow out of the house. You can see the effect is even worse near the deadbolt and door knob. Additionally you can see that the glass (bright white square at the top) is leaking massive amounts of heat because it’s not low-E glass and it’s letting the stuff inside the house radiate heat right through the glass. We might put something over the glass because of this. I’m also wondering why we have some hot spots along that diagonal seam towards the left side of the picture!
This picture shows the crushed stone landscaping (cold texture at the bottom), the shingles, and the small amount of foundation exposed above grade. What’s the super-hot stripe in the foundation? Don’t know, but it definitely needs found and fixed!
This one shows the side/roof on the north side of the house. What’s with that serious hot spot (right underneath the reticle)? Definitely losing some energy there.
The black rectangle is a window with low-E glass in it. Because of the coating on the glass, you can’t see the hot interior. Instead, what you see is outer space (very cold) reflected in the window. Look carefully at the upper corners. What’s with those two hot flares? This is a casement window and, based on looking at some of other identical windows up close, I think the weatherstripping that the window shuts against might be failed. Of course, that ignores the elephant in the room: the HUGE hot spot up under the eaves! No idea how that’s happening but I bet it costs us a fortune!
This is the same type of casement window, but down at ground level, and a double rather than a single. Note how you can actually see the heat flaring out the top of the right hand side. The window is leaking so much air that the hot air rises up the side of the house and heats the wood siding directly above the window. Again, I think this is a failure of the weatherstripping the window shuts against but we’ll have to experiment to be sure.
This is the underside of a balcony hanging off the master bedroom. Note the massive heat leak beside the deck joist where it (presumably) passes into the house. We’ll have to fix this one too.
ATTACH]168118[/ATTACH]
Finally, here’s one from inside the garage (underneath the main level of the house). There’s a lot going on here. At the far left edge, you can see that the panels of the garage door are pretty cold because they’re not well insulated. You can also see that the glass (two cold rectangles, right-ish side of picture) are quite cold because they aren’t low-E glass either. You can also see some cold lines around the where the door shuts, indicating there’s energy loss somehow. We’ll test it with a smoke stick later. However, the real issue is that hot mess at the top! the large orange and purple rectangle coming in from the left is the main duct trunk from the furnace that feeds the registers in the Great Room. Above the right edge of the door is one of the registers. Connecting the trunk to the register is a section of flex duct. It’s leaking like mad. The white-hot line shows a major leak where the flex ties into the trunk. The flex is also leaking somewhere else, though, as you can see a hot spot on the upper left corner of the door due to hot air blowing on it from the leak. Now, this is all in the garage, which isn’t supposed to be heated. So every bit of furnace air that leaks into this space is wasted money because it’s not heating any place that we want heated.
I have dozens more, but really they’re uninteresting to anyone who isn’t working on this house. I just thought some of you guys might be interested in the kind of stuff you can find and fix with a camera like this.