Phone Thermal Camera

Phone Thermal Camera | Look at the heat leaking under my front door! Holy Cow the builder of my home, not me, sure dropped the ball! Photo credit: Tim Carter

DEAR TIM: I know that professionals have expensive thermal imaging devices to look for heating and cooling leaks in homes. I can't afford the hundreds of dollars they cost and wonder if there's a thermal camera that can attach to my smart phone or tablet.

Are you aware of any, have you tested them if they exist and what did you discover? How might I extract the most use from one of these things? Are these toys or real tools? Would you recommend the average person purchase one? Dave L., Wayne, MI

DEAR DAVE: I've seen the professional heat-imaging tools you talk about. This technology has been around for several decades and up until now, you really had to have a professional interest in the magic of infrared to be able to justify spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to see fuzzy images that range from bright yellow to orange to blue.

The good news is that technology marches on and you can now purchase an affordable phone thermal camera for just about any later-model smart phone or tablet. Once you download a free app, you can have the camera working in less than three seconds. That was my experience.

The thermal camera I tested was the Seek Thermal Imaging Camera. If you've seen a person that has a small credit card swiper that attaches to their smart phone or tablet, then you'll love how small the Seek thermal camera is. Believe it or not, it just as wide and sixty-five percent the length of my thumb. That's small!

I tested this thermal camera at my own home at the end of winter and the results were stunning. Within minutes, I was able to detect sources of heat leaking out of my house. Some of these places are easy to fix, while others would be quite difficult.

I can tell you if I were buying an existing or new home and wanted to check out the invisible and latent defects lurking behind walls and under roofs, this is a must-have tool. Currently the price of this smart phone camera is under $200. It's well worth that price if it allows you to negotiate a better deal from the seller or builder of a home. Using this camera, you can see thousands of dollars of things that might need to be repaired.

This camera is by no means a toy, although when you first start to use it you'll think you just opened the best Christmas present ever. You'll start to see hot and cold spots you never thought existed before in your home, car, or out camping.

Those are my feet and I'm standing on my basement floor. You can see the radiant heat pipes in the concrete! They're the three orange stripes. Photo Credit: Tim Carter

The camera has enough sensitivity to locate radiant heating pipes under concrete slabs. I used it in my basement to help me identify the exact location of radiant heat plastic piping in a basement bathroom. It could do the same in walls or ceilings. You want to know where these pipes are in case you decide to drill or cut into a floor, wall or ceiling for a remodel job.

If you're a pet owner and your cat or dog likes to play hide and seek with you and not come indoors, you'll now be able to see them with no difficulty, even if Fido or Tabby is hundreds of feet away. There are different color settings in the app on your phone that allow you to use it very effectively outdoors in daylight or in the dark.

If you live in a big city and have to walk around scary places at night, this is an amazing tool that can let you see people lurking in the shadows. The only people that will be able to hide from you are those wrapped in aluminum foil. I can't remember a time I've ever seen a person doing that! Of course, this thermal camera is going to take all the fun out of kids playing kick the can or hide and seek at night.

If you do your own plumbing, this camera is a great tool to help you locate the exact spot of a clog in a drain pipe. If the water standing in the pipe is warm, believe me you'll see exactly where the clog begins.

You'll be able to spot electrical hazards before they become serious problems. Shorts that are creating micro arcing in switches, outlets or light fixtures will be spotted in seconds. Circuits that are running at peak loads creating heat in the cables will be identified in moments. You can then decide to run an extra new circuit that should help cool down the original cable handling all the load.

If you're a camper or hiker, you can use a thermal camera to alert you to wildlife that you may want to avoid. It can tell you if your campfire is really cold. You'll discover all sorts of uses for it once you start to use it.

I'm convinced that as more people use the phone thermal cameras, they'll become a must-have tool for many. Anyone buying a home will discover it will save them from all sorts of unexpected surprises, especially water leaks in basements behind finished walls and pesky roof leaks that may have been painted over by a homeowner trying to disguise a problem. These phone thermal cameras are game changers to be sure.

I introduced this thermal camera this in my April 7, 2015 AsktheBuilder Newsletter.

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