It always pays off to expand your portfolio of skills and offered services. Becoming a certified thermographer not only makes you more marketable to customers but can significantly improve the quality of your own work.
Thermography has a broad array of applications and reaches across an even broader array of industries. From veterinary sciences to electrical engineering, smelting to brewing, thermography is used to detect problems and irregularities that can’t be detected with the naked eye alone. And this is where your newly acquired thermographic camera training comes in handy.
With hands-on thermal imaging training from expert thermographers, you can expect to undergo:
Thermographic camera training
An inspector is only as good as the tools they use, and you’re going to need to know how to use this thermography equipment before you can do any kind of thermography inspections. This high tech equipment is used to scan for temperature readings, picking up heat signatures in infrared images. This imagery presents itself in vivid colours, and as part of your training not only do you learn how to take these pictures and perform these scans, but when the best time to scan is, where to scan, and what best practices for scanning are.
For instance, it’s oftentimes essential to do multiple scans as opposed to just one. Like a scan before an operation, during operation, and after. Or, it may be best to do a scan at night rather than during the day. With the right training, you can both gather these readings and decipher them accurately to give diagnostics or assist in making a diagnosis.
Electrical Thermography Training
Electrical inspections are probably the most frequently requested infrared inspection, and it’s no surprise as to why. When electrical systems start to fail they produce excessive amounts of heat, and that heat can lead to damaged equipment and even electrical fires. Clients will often need you to scan their electrical equipment to ensure they can have fire insurance.
Electrical infrared scanning allows you to detect what we call ‘hot connections’, where worn circuits create high electrical resistance. This is what causes the heat, and this causes further damage to circuit boards and equipment. With electrical thermography training, you can easily spot these hot connections and learn to decipher the temperature readings. Thus you can best recommend a course of maintenance action for your clients.
Equine Thermal Imaging
By far the most frequently used form of veterinary infrared inspections, infrared cameras are used for equine thermal imaging to detect signs and symptoms of ailments in the animal in a non-invasive way. Everything produces a heat signature, and even in organic life excessive heat is indicative of a problem.
Using your thermal imaging equipment, you can scan and capture images of the animal to detect these irregular heat signatures. While an excessive temperature doesn’t tell you outright what’s wrong with the animal, a thermal scan can be used in conjunction with other diagnostic tests for a veterinarian to make a diagnosis.
Infrared technicians aren’t trained in the veterinary sciences, so you won’t be taught how to make a diagnosis. But you will be taught that hot spots can be signs of a fever, broken bones, internal bleeding, bruising, and infection. By working with a veterinarian, you can work together to gather information needed for an accurate diagnosis.
Roof Infrared Inspections
This is another highly popular inspection you’ll likely get called out for. Roof scans are used to detect leaks and water damage and with some well-timed scans you can pick up even the hardest to spot leaks. While water damage is typically hard to see, it’s easy to pick up in the colourful lens of infrared.
While you’d expect leaks to produce a lower temperature, our training will teach you when the best time to scan is. After a full day in the sun, the water damaging the insulating material in your roof has heated up, producing hot patches where there shouldn’t be. With roof inspections, you can best recommend to a client how extensive their roof repairs should be.
Refractory Infrared Inspections
There’s nothing quite like the failure of refractory equipment to bring operations in a factory, plant or refinery down to a grinding halt. Refractory equipment is used to contain the high heat of furnaces, smelters, burners, ovens, and kilns, all of which produce significantly high temperatures that can damage your other equipment and machinery. Thus, refractory lining forms a protective barrier against this heat. But when it starts to fail, heat seeps out into the surrounding equipment to cause serious damage.
With the help of your trusty thermal imaging equipment, you can perform infrared inspections on refractory equipment during use, checking for signs of heat on the outside of the refractory lining. The earlier heat leaks are detected, the sooner they can be repaired before they grow to cause a total shutdown. It’s important that a client has as much time as possible to organize repairs or replacement parts, as they aren’t easy to attain.
The Broad Spectrum of Infrared Inspections
With your Thermal imaging training, there’s a whole myriad of inspections you can perform, from the ones above to mechanical infrared inspections, solar infrared inspections, plumbing inspections, insulation inspections, pest control inspections, and more. With such a versatile field, you can only stand to benefit in training yourself or your staff to handle infrared equipment and perform inspections. Not only can you quality check your own work, like when installing insulation, but you can provide a maintenance service to many industries, meaning there’s no shortage of work opportunities available.
Our inspectors are on hand to offer you hands-on thermography inspection training, to get you well on your way to becoming a certified thermographer. To find out more about our training courses, feel free to contact us to learn more.