Stop baby room drafts, find heat/loss with FLIR One

If you live in an old house chances are pretty good you’ve got a high heating and cooling bill and you also probably have drafty rooms that you can’t locate why they’re so cold and rooms with temperatures that are wildly uneven.

For the longest time at my house we had the mystery frozen kitchen (there’s insulation underneath, but it’s colder in the corner of the kitchen than it is in the basement below it).

Well, no more. The FLIR One lets you see what is hot, and what is not, and it does it fast enough that you don’t feel like you’re waiting for the image to process (which is a complaint I had about another IR camera I had… good, but drained battery and was slow on my phone.)

The FLIR One appears to have two cameras built on as it combines visible and thermal images together using something they call MSX technology. It’s not using the phone’s built in camera, trust me. It also appears to have two cameras when you’re looking at it, so yeah.

You can see in the dark with the FLIR One, which is kind of cool to go into Predator mode, but I wouldn’t really recommend that due to being blinded by the cell phone light and otherwise incapacitating your night vision.

Being able to see where the cold air is coming from, or see where the heat is leaking out, can enable you to plunk down a few more bucks for insulation in one area and save big on heating costs.

Keeping your baby’s crib out of the cold corner of the room might also be money saving if your kiddo is prone to colds…

Overall it’s a pretty neat little device, probably not going to change your world but may pay for itself after a couple of uses (and then you can loan it to friends).

The FLIR One comes in iOS and Micro USB connectors and points the wrong way on HTC devices but you can purchase a MtF MicroUSB cable to turn the camera to the right direction if you need to.

If you want to know if you’ll need this cable – the Micro USB port that will work has the skinny side nearer the screen, and the fat side near the rear. My HTC products universally are the wrong direction for this.

At the moment the thing’s a bit pricy, I was given one at CES which means it’s been nothing but profit for me, but you might want to wait through the warmer months till the price drops some.

The FLIR One thermal imaging camera is available from Amazon