Radiant Heat Thermal Pictures

I kind of forgot to post these previously – but back in March I had a “home energy audit” done. I had done this once before in 2011 with Grandma so I knew what to expect and this was more of a follow-up to analyze some more changes I had made.

Since I know the guys who do the audit (and they did awesome work here previously) – at Foam-It Insulation – I asked if they could also bring over the thermal camera. If you aren’t sure what that means – a thermal camera is a special digital camera that reads infrared (heat)…so if you point it at your outside wall and there is no insulation, you can basically “see” it. I happen to have radiant floor heat in the downstairs space of the house…so if I point the camera at the floor, I can see exactly where the tubing is buried in the floor, and if there is a leak it will show up as well.

There is a bigger story here, as it was believed when we moved in that the radiant heat was broken (50 years on, it had served it’s time.) But after Mary and I moved in I did some testing and figured out that it wasn’t – I’ll save that story for another post, but needless to say it saved us at least $10,000.

So, of course they hand me the camera and let me wander around and take pictures of things. So for those who are nerdy, here is what embedded radiant heat in your floor looks like – the bright spots are the tubes of hot water running in the floor. These shots are of the downstairs bathroom and laundry room floors. For fun I threw in a shot of the boiler, and some upstairs shots where you can see exactly where insulation is still missing from some walls:

2 thoughts on “Radiant Heat Thermal Pictures

  1. robert @ livebetterelectrically.org

    Glad to see your radiant heat still works. The stuff seems surprisingly long lasting. After spending a winter with my ceiling radiant heat I’m in love with it. So quite and no dry air to cause static shocks all winter. I look forward to the post about how you discovered it still worked. Your water system seems substantially more complicated then my electric system.

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