I borrowed my wife’s FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared) to play a bit with thermal imaging and see how I could benefit from this data down the road. I started scanning thru my office space at home. And my findings were pretty interesting. Some results were predictable, where others came to me more as a surprise. But they all shed some light on past events/malfunctions I’ve experienced. Let’s start with the expected ones. The 6-screens display, the workstation, the router, and the switches are hot. Even though, I found a few interesting hotspot locations. Such as the serious heat bleed in-between the displays. I did notice that the screens are outputting a lot of energy, but I thought that the display surfaces were the main radiation sources. I didn’t expect the backplates’ (including the electronics) heat, bleeding thru the invisible junctions, could be that high. On the workstation, the liquid cooling loop’s radiator and heat exhaust on the top of the case is naturally quite hot. But I’ve also noticed that the six DisplayPort adapter cables (mini-DP to DP) are also pretty warm.

On the unexpected side, on one hand, a couple of stacked NASes turned out to be much cooler than expected. On the other hand, the PLC (Power-Line Communication) adapters are really hot! One of them died on me a few months ago, and I blamed the failure on the electric shortages we had during the storms. Now I believe that it likely just burned-out! Last but not least, I also tested the FLIR on one of our cats to see how it behaves on a biological. Well, I could snap some incriminating shots of Kiki trying to drain the heat from a mobile phone… Cats really seem to have an advanced sense to harvest energy where it is! This first experience with a FLIR was quite interesting to me. I am pretty sure that I could take advantage of this data in some future project. But for now, I have to give it back!

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