Thermal imagers

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Twowaxhack

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I’d like to get one to trace hot water pipe under slabs and to find headers in walls.

Which one should I get ?
 
I became interested in such a tool when I was involved with DIY jobs in the home. The price range is what killed my interest. At the high end, the cost is $25,000. That's around half what my basic set of carpentry, electrician, and plumbing tools runs.



FLIR sells a lot of different imagers, Fluke has a professional line of imagers (some are out of stock), and big tool makers like Ridgid (RT-9x) are also in the business. I would try to find some youtube videos with hands-on demos of products finding hot water lines underneath concrete flooring or inside cement tile, stucco, ceramic, marble, sheetrock and wooden walls. When you find a decent imager, report back here. What works for a pro should work great for an amateur like me.
 
I’d like to have one that could just see hot water pipe behind plywood and drywall.

Im looking for hot water pipe headers, not necessarily leaks.

Where the pipe comes out of the slab then joints are made then the pipe going back into the slab to another location.

I don’t break slabs to repair leaks. I find each end then install a jumper through the attic.

I can do it without a thermal imager but it sure would be a lot easier and I could throw a couple hundred on each ticket to pay for it.

I’ll spend up to $1200.00. Anymore than that then I’m not interested.
 
I have a SeekThermal which plugs into my iPhone and gives you the full image quality of the iPhone. It was only a couple of hundred bucks, and has helped me locate problems with plumbing and electrical lines, plus I have used it to force a landlord at work to increase the insulation in an office building we lease. There were offices where the exterior roof was as warm as the inside of the office. It was below zero outside, and about fifty in the offices that had bad insulation. One of the things about it I really liked was that it has a picture mode which displays the surface temperature. That was really handy when I was documenting the issues with the insulation in the building.

Flir has an extensive line of options, all of them of high quality. I’d recommend going to their website and looking at their selection. Higher resolution, more memory, and a larger display all raise the cost. Once you figure out which Flir unit meets your needs, go to Amazon, and search for it. Then look at the recommended similar units.FCD2F03E-4F4C-4011-9F79-45AB7FBC7DED.jpeg
 
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I rented a FLIR camera from a firm in Texas, and scanned my hot tub and house. Interesting, but in the longrun, it did not tell me anything that I did not already know (or suspect).

the camera took matched pairs of IR and regular light images, so that you knew whatthe heck you were looking at in the IR images.
 
All I want to do is find a hot water pipe in a 2x6 wall covered with thin paneling and drywall.

Nothing fancy.
 
one example - which surprises me! CW pipe behind stucco.jpg << the dark dot is an exterior cold water faucet - and the red "shadow" is the pipe in the stucco-faced wall (on a rented FLIR Exx series imager)
 
Plus I want to hunt for Bigfoot on weekends
its a metal pipe - a better grade of stud finder shoudl locate it.

Yeah but it doesn’t. Not like a thermal imager will

Thanks for the suggestions, I think I have it handled.
 

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