Thermographic images with comments

[Piwoslaw]

I recently got a chance to use a thermal imaging camera and wanted to share some of the results. I'll try to explain some of the finding, but please feel free add your own comments and your own pics.

First, the front door. From the inside, it's cold:

but hot on the outside:


And this is after adding weather stripping!!

What else can be done, apart from replacing the whole door and frame? We are considering building an addition on this side of the house, so we would not want to waste money on a door which will be thrown out in 2-3 years.

Below is the front of the house. You can see that the windows are not much better than the door. These 2 small windows are double-pane argon filled, not openable (so the frame is solid - no hinges or seams). There is a thermal bridge where the top of the wall (insulated with 5cm-thick styrofoam) meets the uninsulated balcony. Also, it seems like a lot of heat is being lost through the basement wall - not something I expected as the basement is not really heated, so its temp is much lower. There is no window where the basement is losing heat on this picture, though there is also no insulation on this basement wall.


The building on the left is my neighbor's garage - unheated and uninsulated.


More thermal bridging at the top of the wall. And of course the balcony door is losing heat. The glass of the balcony door appears to be cool, but it is just reflecting the shy - I noticed that depending on the angle of the picture, glass will either emit heat or reflect it.

[Piwoslaw]

Here is the door to the basement:

The lower right quarter of the door has additional weather stripping and is warm, while the left side, and the upper right edge, allow cold drafts to seep through. I know from experience that these are very small drafts (at least an order of magnitude smaller than with the previous door), but can be easily reduced.

This window needs its top edge sealed - you can see the cold flowing down the rolled down shade. Also, even though the heating system has been off for more than 8 hours, the cast iron radiator is still a few degrees warmer than the rest of the room.


Upstairs bedroom. You can see the outline of the bricks and the slightly cooler cement between them. Notice how the rafters in the ceiling get really cold close to the wall. The hottest objects in this view are electronic devices (left - router, middle - stereo in standby, right - wall wart), busily turning electricity to heat, even though they are not needed at the moment.


Now, a cold spike down the middle of the house: One of the ventilation shafts appears to be sucking cold air through the chimney:

pulling it down, through the whole upper floor:

to the lower floor and abruptly stops halfway down:

The place it stops appears to be totally random - there is nothing visible at that level. In fact, the room's thermostat is on that wall (the small rectangle just under where the cold stops), and its cable uses that shaft to connect to the boiler in the basement. The bottom of the shaft ends in the basement/garage, and I've more or less closed it up down there. Either way, the cold should either go all the way down, or not enter at all. Strange. All the more reason to speed up planning of the new ventilation system with a heat exchanger, which would allow me to totally block all of the ventilation shafts from the cold.

[Piwoslaw]

Now the outside, looking at the western corner. Losing heat through the windows and even more through the garage door. The latter is a no brainer, as the door and its frame are deteriorating and they have cracks big enough to let light in The warm square in the middle of the image is the driveway's flood light, not a hole in the wall.

The above pic also shows:

• Thermal bridging where the wall meets the roof (end of foam insulation), where the wall meets the ground (ditto), and between the main level and basement (foam insulation not overlapping).
• The main wall loses less heat than the basement, even though the basement is 8-12C cooler. This is because the basement has thinner walls (single wall, 40cm thick), while the upstairs has thicker (double wall with air space between, 50cm thick). Also, the foam insulation may be slightly thinner - 3cm for the basement and 5cm for the main wall. Today's standard is between 15cm and 25cm (passive houses) of styrofoam. We plan to add another 15-20cm, but this should go in pair with replacing the windows and rebuilding the roof, which will be very expensive. Sooner, we will add underground insulation (moisture and thermal) to the basement, adding to the wall above ground.

Eastern corner. Again, losing heat through windows and along the roof, but mostly where the neighbor's uninsulated, unheated garage did not allow insulation. Since this neighbor is actually my sister-in-law, there is a chance we might get it insulated in the future.