Robin Green

Infrared heat guns: Cut home energy bills with this tool and a few easy tips

An infrared heat gun can help you locate big or small heat leaks in your house. By measuring and prioritizing your home hot spots and cold spots, you can find the energy efficiency improvements that will cost the least but be most beneficial.

An infrared heat detector can give you a full understanding of where your home is losing heat in winter, or gaining it in summer. The more you know about where heat is entering or leaving your home, the more effective you'll be at controlling energy waste.

With an infrared gun, you just wander around the inside and outside of your house on a hot summer day or a cold winter evening, and point and shoot at windows, outside doors, walls, and other places where heat may leak through. The detector quickly gives you a complete picture of problems with insulation, sealing, or windows in need of replacement.

Professional energy efficiency inspectors often use infrared imaging to illustrate where you're losing or gaining heat, but thermal imaging devices cost a lot and an audit can run more than $200. An infrared heat gun doesn't provide the same colorful graphic printout, but they only cost about $50, so they put this detailed information within reach of the average person.

Most infrared guns come with a beam ratio of 1:12, which means that if you point the gun at a wall 12 feet away, then press the trigger, you'll get a temperature reading for a one square foot section of the wall. They also typically have a laser beam so you can see exactly what spot the reading was taken from.

I suggest starting your infrared thermal audit from the outside. Standing 12 feet from the wall, take repeated readings with your infrared gun to figure out what the baseline temperature is. You are looking for the coolest temperature in cold weather, or the hottest in hot weather when the air conditioner is running.

Don't take readings on a sunlit surface, because it can skew your results. Rather, wait for a cloudy period, for evening, or for the sun to move.

Note each reading on a sketch of the wall or in note form. Pay extra attention to window temperatures, because windows are major sources of thermal leakage in both summer and winter. You might benefit from an inside helper to close blinds and curtains after your first reading so you can then note the impact of such window coverings on stopping thermal leaks.

Where measurements are much worse than your reference (warmer in winter, colder in hot weather), take more measurements close by, to locate the boundaries of the thermal leak. You might have missing or settled insulation, cracks in the wall surface, or a gap in a window or door.

Next do an indoor thermal audit of the exterior walls, floor, and ceiling of each room. Choose an interior wall as your baseline; exterior wall temperatures should be cooler than the reference in winter, or warmer in summer. Again, you are after thermal leaks on window glass, around windows and doors, through light fixtures, in cracks in drywall or plaster, or anywhere that is touching an outside wall. Take close-up measurements of any wall outlets or light switches that are near the exterior, even if they are on an interior wall.

Take readings of top floor ceilings, as insulation, especially blown in insulation, can get disturbed or matted down in leaky attics. For hot weather readings, do your ceiling readings twice: once in the early morning before the sun has warmed the attic space, and once in the afternoon when the attic is hot, so you can see how much of that heat is leaking into your living space.

Chances are that windows without their window coverings are your biggest heat leaks, as even the most efficient windows have a much lower R-value than walls or ceilings. You can either replace old windows with more efficient ones, add thermal drapes or shades, or apply thermal barrier window film to the glass itself.

You may well find drafts in walls, particularly at light fixtures or where wires or pipes exit the house. You want to seal these as best you can, as drafts can be major contributors to home energy costs. Seal around the edges of window frames; use wall outlet foam pads to block airflow through the outlets. Your bricks may need tuck pointing, or you may have a more serious problem: settled cellulose insulation between wall studs, in which case the only solution is to take down the walls from within and put in new insulation and drywall. If you have no insulation whatsoever you may just be able to inject foam insulation, which is a cheaper option.

It makes a lot of sense to do your own mini-audit with your infrared heat gun first, and call the contractors later. If you have identified your big thermal leaks, you'll be able to ask each contractor what approach they recommend to your problem. Asking a contractor over and just telling them the house gets too cold in winter, or too hot in summer, means inviting major repairs that might not help at all.

You can use an infrared heat detector for countless other measurements around the house, such as gauging hot water pipe temperature before and after adding pipe wrap; reading the air coming out of forced air registers and going into the air return register, if you have central air conditioning, to gauge air conditioner efficiency; measuring frying temperatures on your stove; or finding the ideal location in your basement for a wine cellar.

Whatever model infrared heat detector you choose, you are sure to get many hours of use out of it, finding the hotspots and cold spots in your walls, floors and ceilings, your garage, your fridge, freezer, your car engine - anywhere you want to know the surface temperature. You can even use it to measure the temperature of your compost heap - without getting your hands dirty!

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