Are cheap-ish infrared cameras worth it? Pic related (or similar stuff from various other brands or word-salad companies directly from China) is about 200€.Is that good enough to find spots where my house is leaking heat or letting in cold?Maybe checking my cabling that theirs is no heated up areas too. Or is such a cheap, low-res device worthless?I guess for doing IR porn, I’d need a better one, but for /diy/ that seems ok enough.
>>2876346Fuck yeah bro
>>2876348Yeah dude!Looking at more expensive offerings:Are they just more expensive because they’re more robust and aimed at police, fire departments and other >lol, we’re just spending taxpayers moneyentities, or are they really 3x better than some random tool-brand offer, aimed at /diy/homeowners?
Or should I got >contractor grade with 2-fucking-k€ for Milhousee? (Or same price for Botsch).Oddly enough, this thing has a sensor res of 160 x 120 px, whereas >>2876357 has double that, which seems to me like the most important part.
>>2876358>>2876357>>2876348>>2876346The problem with these "affordable" units is the resolution and frame rate. It's absolute dog shit. They're typically built around a flir lepton, which you can pick up for $60.
Topdon or straight from the guys that make the chip infiray.
>>2876346I bought https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005179484236.html just recently, the cheapest supposedly 256x192 50Hz camera from chinks, it's still in shipping for about a week but I'll post about it here or in the chinkshit general when it arrives. I'm guessing it will be good enough for /diy/.>>2876358[tool brand] cameras are definitely a scam.
Does anyone have the Flir that goes on your phone? I just want to do the stuff OP wrote as well> find spots where my house is leaking heat or letting in cold?Because I live in an old house with shingles. It sounds like a steal, as I can probably save €100 each winter with less heat lossAdditional question, during heavy rain and with some specific wind direction we sometimes have tiny leaks that show up as wet spots in cabinet. Could a low res one like the cheap flir find the location of these or is it easier going up the roof and inspecting every shingle and ridge
>>2876367>resolutionYeah, that’s what I’m kinda worried about, guess for figuring out which corner of my window is leaking, I need a bit more than 16x16, but even expensive stuff doesn’t seem to go above 340x480 which, coming from digital cameras, also seems ridiculously tiny, nowadays. >frame rate Yeah, that IR pron would suck at a low frame rate (and resolution) but for insulation purposes, a still image should be enough.
>>2876385Flir has cores that are 640x512 60hz with radiometric abilities. They are a few thousand and you'll have to make the housing yourself but it's totally worth it And yes, I make the best flir sissy porn
>>2876386> They are a few thousand and you'll have to make the housing yourself but it's totally worth itGuess I gotta make a business plan for that kind of expense. And I’d rather try it with a cheaper variant first. Question’s just: how cheap will be good enough?
>>2876393If all you're doing is is finding window leaks then a 120p radiometric model is fine.
>>2876374What did you make you choose that one?Just because it’s cheapest for the specs or did it get recommended elsewhere?Looks tempting, but if been tricked by Chang more than once, but this isn’t some cheap chink shit where I wouldn’t care.
Got a Flir one in the mail today. Posting some examples on the default setting.This corner had a wasp nest years ago and nobody bothered replacing the insulation
>>2877435PVC door, the most insulating one I have in my house, looks leak free except for cat gate
>>2877438Older door that splits at the middle, could use some stripping I guess
>>2877439Big leak under a desk. There’s an access hole behind a small door to inspect the roof. Needs some XPS
>>2877440I don’t think the ceiling is supposed to look like this, previous owner missed a spot. Hope I have enough rockwool leftIt spots warm water lines easily through the wall, so if a cable gets hot I think it would show as well. If anyone is interested I could probably try it on a control cabinet later this week
Hell yeah. Flir thread!
>>2877435Which model, what did it cost, and link? Overall are you happy with it?
>>2877490Flir One, as I wrote in the first post, the iOS variant. Yes I’m happy with it, it’s easy to work with, just charge it and go. No big downsides yet but I wouldnt drop it.May be harder to use in small spaces because you have to your your phone while keeping both the photo and termal camera free
>>2876640Cheapest for the specs that doesn't look like a scam just by pricing. Because there are ones claiming 256x192 that cost $100, those are definitely not gonna be as rated, and there are other models similarly priced that claim similar specs. It has a few positive youtube reviews as well, which however don't really go into detail on resolution. Also at this price point even if it's slightly lower resolution, it's not a bad deal.
>>2877438Take closer pics of the trim and the lock gapThe problem with low resolution is it blurs everything from any distance
Don't forget you can jailbreak FLIR E4 to turn raise the resolution and add E8 features.
>>2876367> The problem with these "affordable" units is the resolution and frame rate. It's absolute dog shit.you don't really need much to see missing insulation or leaks
>>2877644actually, maybe i should have posted something relevant. this was a gap in some insulation in the loft
>>2877646At what distance does it stop working?
>>2876358Bosch is a piece of shit, so is Major Tech and my assumption is Milwauke is too. They're all shenzen parts bin specials - i looked into making my own to take over the local market.Used to sell both Hikmicro and Fluke. Fluke doesnt deserve the name it has anymore, their new holding company has been cutting production costs so a number of the TiS45 and above arrived DOA to customers and their low end stuff generally isnt price competitive (here in Aus).So long as you don't care about warranty or recalibrating, i'd honestly go for Hikmicro on handheld thermography units. Bang for buck, drop rated and semi decent free software. As a company they're a POS to work with, but their products are decent.I work with electricians and plumbers and have always pushed having a 350x250 sensor as a minimum. Anything smaller and it's hard to differentiate between objects. For hold/cold spots you can get away with 256x192 though especially if you expect to see a big temperature differentials.Added bonus, read up on emissivity and thermal reflections to understand how materials affect your readings or how to spot false positives.Also, don't be like those tech YT channels using these to state absolute temperature readings. IR cameras are fundamentally flawed so use them for relative readings between 2 neighboring objects (over tightened terminals) or as problem identification (dragging bearings).
>>2876374Got the Mileseey 256E. I wager it's true 256x192 pixel, the images look decently sharp. For 160 euros on sale (with coupon) including tax, that was a good deal. Temperatures are consistently a bit off, usually 2-5 degrees, obviously depending on what material you're looking at, that is probably normal. It doesn't have mixed camera/edge detection modes, figured I probably didn't need it for the price difference. Pic reference:>radiator lines under laminate floor 1-3 meters distance>house, 10 m>doge, 1m>chickem, 15-20m>heating manifold, 50cm>return lines of manifold, 20cm>boiler, heating pipes, 3m>radiator with plant in front, 2m
>>2877581There’s a rubber sealing strip but it’s still colder than the door. I guess it’s normal, the difference isnt huge
>>2878057Left side. Pretty meh for a modern ugly plastic door
>>2877644Cat pic for reference, the difference between $120 Flir One and the $350 E4
>>2877646Is it better to look for warm spots on the cold side (as opposed to detecting cold spots on the warm side)?
>>2878058>>2878057Honestly your best bet is to just feel itYou don't have the color chart on the side, purple and red could be -59 and 1000 respectively
>>2878020Good post People underestimate how critical resolution, frame rate, lens diameter, and thermal sensitivity are
>>2878020>>Also, don't be like those tech YT channels using these to state absolute temperature readings. IR cameras are fundamentally flawed so use them for relative readings between 2 neighboring objects (over tightened terminals) or as problem identification (dragging bearings).IR/EO Optical Engineer here. The above is completely true. None of this shit is calibrated, and even if it was that's not the temperature, that's the apparent temperature (some things are more reflective than others, you could be looking at the energy partly from the object, partly from whatever it's reflecting).People calling it temperature drives me bananas.
>>2878120This too. All these cameras auto adjust to make the picture look like something; upper and lower values could be a degree apart. (Not that these cameras have that level of accuracy, despite reporting temps like they do. . . )
>>2878120>>2878122I can put a color scale in the picture if I want to. But those aren’t any kind of accurate anyway afaik, >>2878131 is right. I just look at the differences. In >>2877442 it is pretty obvious that one row of rockwool is missing. I paid $130 for it, my gas bill for November alone was $300 so even with shit resolution it will pay for itself in a year or two
>>2878169Mine are flir cores and I paid 4k for them eachIt's not obvious there's rockwool because you showed a picture of a door and only a small section of the wallYour picture is also skewed because your doorknob is reflecting yourself like a mirror.If you can include the scale during a conversation like this, then do so.
>>2876346just get a phone with a flir built in. ulefone has good phones. i have an armor 9 going on 5yrs old. yeah it's more than 200 bucks, but you're killing two birds with one stone.unless you're one of these queers has to have a new iphone every 2 months. then do what you want.
>>2878174
>>2878174moar
>>2878176this one tripped me up a sec, until i realized that ir is still light, and will reflect off surfaces same as visible light will.
>>2876383i have this. it sucksit constantly freezes and acts up. im just waiting for a firmware upgrade to fix this, but it aint cominggreat for looking around thigs, but frustrating to use otherwise.it will help you find leaks. but then what? are you prepared to tear down drywall?>>2877641info on this
>>2878177>will reflect off surfaces same as visible light willActually things tend to be a lot more shiny in far IR because longer wavelength ignores small imperfections that diffuse or absorb visible light. Especially bare metal surfaces like stainless steel and such often look like a mirror in IR even when when they're nowhere near polished to the eye.It's also why using non-contact thermometer on metal is a bad idea - it will measure the temperature of whatever happened to reflect in it instead of the metal itself.
>>2878210>ackshuallysorry. had to. that's what that is that it's reflecting off of - 304 stainless with a brushed finish and a bunch of oily fingerprints from me drilling 100 holes in it. nothing close to a polish or anything for sure.>It's also why using non-contact thermometer on metal is a bad idea - it will measure the temperature of whatever happened to reflect in it instead of the metal itself.probably never would have deduced that on my own, but now that you mention it, it makes sense.
>>2878210>>2878215Standard practice is just put some tape like painters blue tape it'll heat up to the same temp as whatever is stuck to and measure thatLiterally every type of surface reflects different. If you're using same tape for everything then should be the sameIf you're doing house walls all the same paint then those should be comparable. But even diff colors are slightly different though that's likely not even 1 degree
>>2878136I noticed that early on with my phone, once. It only shows a range, and if something is heading for the upper limit of that range, it re-adjusts everything else to compensate.Here's a clip of me warming up my coffee cup before pulling a shot. Everything's a uniform color more or less until the kettle (which would be ~212F/100C) comes into frame.https://files.catbox.moe/d1ryie.mp4
>>2878228Yep that's a good practice. But I see people on youtube doing blacksmithing and welding measure temps on bare metal all the time (not that there are many tapes that can handle the heat they work with though). Oxidation dulls the surface and increases emissivity, but again you never know by how much without an actual IR camera.Also a good idea is to check if your specific tape isn't ackchully transparent in IR. Blue painters most likely isn't, but many plastic types very much are.
>>2878316I believe some expensive professional cameras allow you to manually set the range. But it's really not something you need often if your line of work doesn't justify that kind of expense.Also even if it's they're not very accurate in measuring specific temperatures, cheap cameras still can see small differences between neighboring objects. I use mine to tell how much CO2 I've left in a cylinder for example. After you've drawn some gas, or when you bring it from outside in winter, liquid inside gets colder than the rest of the cylinder and even though the difference sometimes is really tiny, maybe some 0.1s of a degree, you can still see it on camera well enough to tell when you need to get another cylinder ready.
>>2878177>>2878176>>2878175>80x60 resolutions >1.4mbSomeone put this guy in jail
>>2878331You can also do stuff like outliar rejection, and set the skew for rejecting highest and lowest evenly, or scale it with another setting to be biased, like only reject cold out liars.I write c code to program these flir cores
>>2878197Mine doesn’t appear to freeze, also put the caibration on manual. I posted those pictures with the leaks on Tuesday with it> are you prepared to tear down drywall?Don’t have much drywall, I live in an old farm so it’s mostly brick and wood. And I’m prepared to tear everything down, the last real Reno work was done in 2006. So tore down a wall cabinet to find a huge hole leading to the roof, removed flooring in the attic to put missing insulation back and sealed the gaps in >>2877435 with PUR and put some wood strip to cover it
>>2878326Oh ya. Weird to even measure the temp of the metal in that scenario. Just hit it with the hammer lmfao
>>2878367wut
>>2878464The image should not be that large and wasting people's bandwidth like that used to be considered an Internet crime. That flir cores is probably a 120p lepton with an 8 color pallet. There's absolutely no excuse in it being that large of a file size. It should be like 10kb
>>2878469shut up, you fucking queer.
>>2878470Kys you fucking pleb
>>2878472no u
>>2878475Fix your file output settings
>>2878479move on from dial up you whiny cunt
>>2878469>wasting people's bandwidthwhat else are you going to use it for
>>2878463I don't mean when it's glowing hot of course, IR camera or thermometer won't even show anything useful at that point. In welding for example you often need to bring the part to a few hundred degrees so it won't crack or something. Another one I remember seeing more than a few times is hot pressing bearing or bushings, people would whip out the magic device and go like "aaand we're at 168.5°C which is about right so we could start" lmao. I'm fairly certain that in most of those the part was way overheated at that point.
>>2878486You're not white. You think a customer having access to more resources means you have more resources to use
>>2878490It's more about bandwidth caps than it is about speed, ram as wellThis is as outrageous as a 1080p picture with a 100gb file size
>>2878367It isn't so much his fault as the tards at Flir intentionally blowing up the picture with the edge detect conventional camera overlay to make it seem like a better product than it actually is. I still don't know how they manage to get a 1.4MP dogshit jpeg to 1.2MB.
>>2878606yes
>>2878608He has options to correct this situation.The picture still only has like 8 colors and those edge lines do not add that much space. They are fucking incompetent for even making that thing in the first place, perhaps even criminal.
>>2878608No, no - don't you see? I'm supposed to alter my phone's settings and/or manually resize my pictures because one malcontent is upset that he knowingly and willingly clicked on an image to view it and wasn't happy with what he got.Here you go, gramps. Hope your modem doesn't overheat.
>>2878697Kid, you're trying to show off a fucking fkir one for $120 in 2025.You're loading 1980s quality pics that couldn't fit a single pic on a floppy now you're ass blasted you got exposed as even more of a foolPost some modern flir shit or post an appropriate file size. My equipment is better than yours and wouldn't even put out a file size that huge. My shits 640p. Yours is a fucking potato by comparison.
>>2878608Guess what you idiot, you wouldn’t be able to see shit without the edges overlaid. The one thing that has made thermal imagine accessible under $1k is the combination of cheap cameras and fast processors that allows a very low res thermal chip to be overlaid to show something actually useful.
>>2878730>>2878048
>>2878730>Protip: ITS STILL NOT USEFUL, DUMBASS!
>>2878726anon, i made it clear it was a phone from five years ago.maybe worry about your own floppy you impotent old fag lmao>muh filesizes>internet is expensive>i could do better but i won't because i'm way to cool>grrrr being angry is my whole personalityWhy won't boomers just die?
>>2878745Why can't you learn to yluse the toys you bought?You're the boomer here
>>2878756>still crying>in a thread where the op asked about cheap thermali'm the boomer, but you're the bitch lol.
>>2878757You're the retard that can't set up your equipment then gets ass blasted of it getting pointed out
>>2878758
>>2878759You're the one crying because the settings on your goysuuumer toy are too advanced for you
>>2878762
>>2878813You're not even trying to defend yourself at this point cause you k no w you got btfo, so instead of being a man on an anonymous forum, you're still going to double down and try to save face by screaming that youre trolling
>>2878835
>>2878726Youre the faggot in this argument fyi
Yay!It’s at customs!Maybe I can search for heat leaks during Christmas break.
I want to get a sensor to mount of a FPV or to point down onmy model rocket so I can see the exhaust gasses. also it would be cool.so how fucked is this going to kill my wallet anons?
>>2880689Low res is not expensive. High res is expensive.
>>2878136>All these cameras auto adjust i recently bought a hikmicro mini2plus which does allow me to kind of set a manual span. it's definitely useful.
>>2878726Is this better?
>>2881335
>>2881496This is the best, but you could get away with maximum loss considering how noisy the default image is.
Ah hell yeah infrared thread. I used to daily a flir e6 and then later a flir e8 xt back when I did water damage cleanup. Very handy for chasing leaks in high-rise condos and quickly scanning rooms for water damage. Wish I had better pictures I could post but they are all mostly on my old work phone. The e8 was so nice I walked into a ballroom with 20+ foot tall ceilings and could point out exactly where the water was starting to saturate tape seams even from the opposite side of a 40 ft long room.Imo flir is the gold standard for thermal either the shitty phone plug in one or the c2 or c3 are fine for occasional/hobbies use. Fluke is another reputable brand that I used a couple times but I don't really have a strong opinion on them. Buying outside of that you kinda get what you pay for if you want to go cheap even if it's a amazon basic camera vs a milwauke thermal I feel like it's all basically the same.
Chang delivered!Pretty neat. Gotta play with it a bit. So here’s a bump to keep the thread alive until I can upload some pics.
>>2876346After owning 1 Flir product, im not sure im gonna buy from them again. Bought a Flir One a couple of years ago, and it have had the same annoying problem from day one. It cant retain battery power.Need to ise my flir camera, but the battery is empty. So it charge it before using it. After end use i charge it to full, and put it away. Then a couple of days later i need to use it again, and the battery is already empty…
My wife got me a Flir TG165-X for Christmas and had me open it early today. Didn't have time to fuck around with it much today, but gonna mess around with it and see what all stuff I can scope out!
>>2876346i got the 300 dollar chink uni-t one.
>>2882309Chang should pay me for all the marketing I do for them.
>>2882488I'll tell him.But unlike most marketing, it seems like the advertised product is actually quite decent.Now I know where the pipes for my heating run.
>>2882845>quite decent.Hell, even the file sizes are OK.What's not OK, however, are my windows. I would have expected that 30yo double pane windows are a tad better than that. Also, seems like the installation was shitty, when there's such a cold zone around it (Outside temp is slightly above zero).
>>2882846But at least my fridge is heating quite well.
