Thursday, February 5, 2009

Thermal Imaging - QA work for your house


This morning we were supposed to have a thermal imaging company take pictures of our house (Original source Passivhaus Institut, Germany – http://www.passiv.de, for more examples see here). The idea is to be sure the house was built according to specs and there are no thermal bridges. This is similar to following your quality plan in software development. A thermal bridge can be compared to a memory leak - there are small ones and big ones. In a passive house you usually can find big "memory leaks" yourself because the inside wall would be cold in the winter. Smaller leaks are hard to find and many of them can add up to some energy loss.

Anyway, the sun was already out and had warmed up two sides of the house, so the imaging didn't make sense. Now it's back to waiting for another appointment to come up. On the bright side the thermal imaging guy let me look at our house and I couldn't spot anything concerning. It's also interesting to see your house, mostly colored in blue (good sign).

BTW: It would be nice to have a thermal camera for software products. Take a snapshot and you have most (all?) leaks.