Vinyl Siding

[wfambrough]

David-

Do you own a borescope? A small hole can show alot. Also I learned to not use the rainbow color pallette on the camera during a ITC Building Science course. You will get the best resolution fron the Grey scale. Not as exciting as the rainbow but much better for figuring out anomalies. Try this yourself and you will see a difference. Also remember Emissivity and focus are essential to good thermograms. What time of day was the IR taken?

[David A. Andersen]

Yes, I do own a bore scope. I did look through the slip joint of the siding but did not find anything substantial. In this particular case, I do not feel there is a significant deficiency but I am very interested in what caused the thermal anomaly seen.

I used the grayscale during the inspection but changed it afterwards in my computer program to enhance temperature change and boundary. Most people have a hard time seeing things in black-and-white so enhancing the scan in color makes the temperature gradient more obvious to the untrained eye. You are correct, resolution is much higher in the grayscale. Rainbow (which is used extensively in advertising infrared equipment) has the least resolution but has a greater WOW factor.

I use color in the manual mode when I'm doing fast walk through inspections just to look for specific issues, such as overheated electrical circuits or to verify air flow from HVAC supply air registers. It shows up faster that way. Then I change back and adjust the camera if I find a problem.

Focus is, emissivity is not essential to good thermograms. Emissivity is only necessary to determine the actual versus apparent temperatures. The a bolometer (if focused) will record the same data in a camera regardless of your emissivity settings.

[David A. Andersen]

See the difference between this black-and-white and those I posted above?