Thursday, December 17, 2015

Spot “Vs” Area Temperature Measurement using IR Cameras

Over the years I have been involved in the infrared industry I have seen some mistakes made and problems missed using spot temperature measurements on IR cameras, luckily these were rectified using the IR software when the reports were written… (would not have been the case had we been using “report by exception” techniques!).

I have always trained my thermographers to use area measurement at all times, in particular the “area max temperature function” this way we ensure that we do everything to make sure we don’t miss anything that may be detrimental during the inspection, and this is more important when inspecting through IR Windows!

There are instances when the use of spot temperature measurement techniques are very effective, especially when trying to compare one item to another in an IR image to see what the temperature difference is, or when trying to correlate one component to another, etc…  However as a rule I have always found it best practice to use the area maximum temperature function whilst conducting electrical surveys using IR cameras.