Why a Thermal Image Inspection Can Easily & Efficiently Diagnose Any Home HVAC System Issues – A New Staple In Your Energy Rater Toolkit

Thermal imaging cameras are starting to become a staple in any energy rater toolkit. A thermal imaging inspection can help create a visual representation of issues that we find in a home.

Having rated so many homes in the past, I know where most of the problem spots are located during a visual inspection. Canned lights, attic accesses, entry doors, and light sockets are common problem areas for building leakage.

Diagnose Home Efficiency Issues On the Spot

As we talked about in our air leakage introduction article, a Blower Door is used to diagnose the leakiness of a house as a whole.

When a blower door number comes back above our target range, that’s when we bust out the thermal camera.

With the house depressurized, it exaggerates holes in your building envelope so that we don’t miss a spot.

To the left is a photo of an air conditioning register, with the unit turned off!

I remember when I was first getting BPI certified, we did a walkthrough with a thermal camera on our test house. It was one thing to talk about building leakage, missing insulation, and crushed ducting in photos and on the whiteboard, but something completely different to see it with your own two eyes in the field. It was a very wowing experience.

If you look at the scanned light to the side, you might wonder to yourself what hidden energy problems you might have in your own home.