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Spent $400 on a thermal camera for my phone and it's the best tool I own now
I bought it last fall thinking it was a cool toy, but I used it on a call for a weird hot spot in a wall. Found a bad connection behind drywall in under two minutes that would have taken an hour to trace. It paid for itself that first week. Anyone else using these for quick trouble spots?
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michael8952mo ago
Sounds cool but I mean it's still a pretty specific tool. Most people aren't finding bad wires in their walls every day. For drafts you can just use your hand or a candle to feel for air. I guess if you have a really old house with constant problems it makes sense, but for a normal place it seems like overkill. Maybe it's just me but dropping four hundred bucks on a camera to find a draft feels like fixing a problem that isn't really there.
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My old house had a draft we could never find. The camera showed a cold line running right down from a bathroom vent where the duct had come loose in the attic. Sealed it up with foil tape and our heating bill dropped twenty bucks that month.
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ward.piper2mo ago
Finding hidden drafts feels like winning a tiny house lottery. We had a weird whistle in our bedroom for years, turned out to be a gap under the baseboard where the floor met an outside wall. A tube of caulk fixed what we thought was just a noisy old window.
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