Thermographic Surveys

Thermographic surveys have an increasingly important role in energy saving. Aside from being damaging to the environment, losing warm air from your home or office can be costly. Some providers put their prices up by 15% last year, and there’s no sign of these price rises slowing.

Finding the cause of warm air loss can be time consuming, but thermographic surveys are a great way to see the warm and cold spots in and around your building quickly and easily.

Using a thermographic survey can not only help you identify where heat is escaping, it’ll also alert you to areas prone to damp and flag up leaks in pipes and roofs.

If you want to go that extra, environmentally friendly mile and gain a sustainability accreditation such as BREEAM, a thermographic survey is an important part of the process.

So what is a thermographic survey and how does it work?

A thermographic survey inspection uses a still camera and infrared imaging or an infrared video to visualise heat and cool areas on the outside of a building or object.

On the infrared images warm areas are shown as lighter colours, and colder areas display as black, or darker colours.

This footage or images are then used to create a thermogram that identifies exactly where heat leakage (or water leakage) is occurring.

Images show the movement of air at different temperatures, so can also be conducted from inside a building too. This is particularly handy in wet or windy weather where outside temperatures can impact the surface temperatures of a building.

Thermographic surveys can also be really useful to analyse the integrity of insulation too. Insulation conducts heat at different rates depending on whether it is wet or dry, so it’s an unobtrusive way to detect leaks in roof spaces too.

Preparing for a thermographic survey

To get the best results from your thermographic survey, there are a few ways that you can prepare your property to be sure of an accurate result from your thermographic imaging.

Removing curtains, blinds and furniture from external walls and windows can help you to get more accurate readings. Window dressings can reduce drafts and affect air flow, after all, that’s part of the reason we use them!

If you’d like to arrange a thermographic survey to identify energy wastage, areas of insufficient insulation, leaks in roofs or pipes, or even to take the next step towards securing an energy efficiency accreditation, contact Rainbow on 01623422488. With the correct equipment and training, we’ll visit your property to provide a quote before carrying out a thermographic survey and producing thermographic maps of your property.