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TIL a $400 thermal camera found a problem my multimeter missed completely
I was chasing a weird intermittent power drain on a G1000 install in a Cessna 182. My Fluke showed normal voltage drops everywhere I checked, but the plane kept eating batteries overnight. Got fed up and bought a cheap Seek thermal camera on sale. Pointed it at the main bus bar with everything off and saw one terminal glowing warm. It was a tiny crack in the insulator letting just enough current through to heat up, but not enough to show on the meter. That camera paid for itself in two hours of saved labor. I would have been pulling panels for days. Anyone else use thermal imaging for this kind of fault finding, or am I just late to the party?
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joseph_adams666mo ago
Wow, that's a genius use for a cheap thermal cam.
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blair_dixon6mo ago
Seriously... what was the actual use case though? I keep seeing these pop up but never a clear example of what people are doing with them. Like are you checking for heat leaks at home or something else entirely? The cheap ones have such low resolution I'm curious what problem they actually solve.
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lisak266mo ago
Honestly, it's probably just for finding a warm spot on a pet. Not exactly a home inspection tool.
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