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I thought those cheap thermal cameras for phones were a total joke... until I found a short on a board in under 2 minutes.
For a while, I figured the $200 phone attachment thermal cams were just toys. Then a job in Austin had me tracing a weird voltage drop in a complex media panel. I borrowed one from another tech on site, and it lit up a hot spot on a power supply board almost right away. It was a tiny short I would have spent hours hunting with a meter. Has anyone else found a good use for these on regular install calls?
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elliotl246mo ago
My shop in Houston tried one for a month. It was useless for anything not already smoking hot. You still need a meter to confirm the actual fault. I'd rather trust solid probe work than a blurry heat blob.
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the_fiona6mo ago
Totally get that, they're just another tool in the box.
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wade_hall4mo ago
Well heck, that's a fair point about the blurry blobs... but I think folks are missing the real trick with thermal cameras. They're not for finding the exact bad wire, they're for finding the circuit that's acting up before you even touch a meter. I had a buddy who used one on a big commercial panel and spotted a hot bus bar connection that wasn't even smoking yet, just a few degrees warmer than its neighbor. Saved him hours of poking around blind.
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