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Another use for thermal


Bob57

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Had a few invites to shoot duck, so thought I'd take the thermal spotter aswel as the lab, came in very handy for any duck that had dropped way out on the wheat, or still on the water that hadn't been picked😃

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A friend built a house which had underfloor heating.

The heating consisted of thin plastic pipes set into the concrete of the floor and which then had hot water pumped through them.  He had this in every room and had a fairly complicated control system of thermostats and motorised valves to direct the hot water to the right set of pipes.

Unfortunately the electrician who had wired up the system had mixed up some of the thermostats and motorised valves with the thermostat in one room causing the floor in another room to heat up.

I went round with the thermal imager and told him to operate one thermostsat at a time.

I was able to clearly see the pattern of hot pipes in a room within 2 minutes of him turning on a thermostat.

In less than an hour we had matched the thermostats to the valves and simply had to swap the connectors on the motorised valves to get the whole system working correctly

 

Cheers

 

Bruce

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i was out with the other night, and while taking a break i had a qiuck fag and a brew, then carried on and found out i,d  lost my zippo hand warmer, my mate who was on his thermal said no worries i can see it,  it was about 150 yds away . modern technology is great dt

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7 hours ago, Paul Cat said:

Stop it the pair of you. I've only just been drawn into IR, my bank account has gone into hiding at the sight of this thread.

I told you you'll end up spending loads a money 😁😁

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This thread has given me an idea I'll take mine with me on Saturday for a driven pheasant shoot it's a woodland shoot and or though we have a good team of picker ups some times it's difficult to find a bird in the cover so I'll try with a thermal.

ive got the latest from Clive Ward so my trusty Pulser 38s is up for sale just pm if interested.

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1 hour ago, Montey said:

This thread has given me an idea I'll take mine with me on Saturday for a driven pheasant shoot it's a woodland shoot and or though we have a good team of picker ups some times it's difficult to find a bird in the cover so I'll try with a thermal.

ive got the latest from Clive Ward so my trusty Pulser 38s is up for sale just pm if interested.

Funny you should say that, I was thinking of taking mine the last time I was picking up but decided not to in the end. Let us know how you get on if you take it.

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  • 4 months later...

Every evening for the last week or so we've had the pleasure of watching a barn owl hunt the back field while eating our dinner, and wondered if they have a nest in one of the barns, as it flies back to farmyard fairly regularly.

last night I decided to stand on the back of the truck, in the gateway leading into the field to shoot some rabbits that are chewing the wheat off, watching through the thermal when a barnie flies down the grass margin, over my head and into the old barn 80yds away, which i now know has a board missing behind an elderberry bush.

I spent the next 2 hours watching both going in and out, a magic couple of hours of viewing through the thermal and now I know where they are 😃.

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1 hour ago, Bob57 said:

Every evening for the last week or so we've had the pleasure of watching a barn owl hunt the back field while eating our dinner, and wondered if they have a nest in one of the barns, as it flies back to farmyard fairly regularly.

last night I decided to stand on the back of the truck, in the gateway leading into the field to shoot some rabbits that are chewing the wheat off, watching through the thermal when a barnie flies down the grass margin, over my head and into the old barn 80yds away, which i now know has a board missing behind an elderberry bush.

I spent the next 2 hours watching both going in and out, a magic couple of hours of viewing through the thermal and now I know where they are 😃.

Among other things, I do wildlife surveys for a living.  We use thermal scopes and cameras a lot, often for the kinds of things you descrbe here.  Lovely to watch too - sometimes it's not just about the science!

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6 hours ago, Plecotus said:

Among other things, I do wildlife surveys for a living.  We use thermal scopes and cameras a lot, often for the kinds of things you descrbe here.  Lovely to watch too - sometimes it's not just about the science!

A thermal spotter must be a godsend if you do wildlife surveys, must save so much time, as I found out this evening when i quietly opened a small door into the big old barn to see if I could see the owlets, there's an old owl box, been in there years, and I could see the heat source coming off them through the ply sides, not sure how many in there but we'll leave them in peace and hopefully they'll all make it out☺.

 

 

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12 hours ago, Bob57 said:

A thermal spotter must be a godsend if you do wildlife surveys, must save so much time, as I found out this evening when i quietly opened a small door into the big old barn to see if I could see the owlets, there's an old owl box, been in there years, and I could see the heat source coming off them through the ply sides, not sure how many in there but we'll leave them in peace and hopefully they'll all make it out☺.

 

 

We've got several in my business now and they are used most weeks.

Barn Owl chicks spend a long time in the nest so you should be able to watch the adults carrying foor in for a good while.  They may well have a second (or more) brood too.  They's been recorded breeding in every month of the year in Britain!  They are also one of the most widely distributed species in the world - they are found from here to India and many places in between.

If you werent so far away, I'd be asking if I could come and ring the chicks.

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34 minutes ago, Plecotus said:

We've got several in my business now and they are used most weeks.

Barn Owl chicks spend a long time in the nest so you should be able to watch the adults carrying foor in for a good while.  They may well have a second (or more) brood too.  They's been recorded breeding in every month of the year in Britain!  They are also one of the most widely distributed species in the world - they are found from here to India and many places in between.

If you werent so far away, I'd be asking if I could come and ring the chicks.

That sounds like a nice job you have there👍, I'd say barn owls are definitely more prolific than ever, I've been foxing at night for a good 35 years now, and not many years ago it was a rare treat to see one while out, but these days I see them on every shoot I visit.

The one thing that upsets me most is how few swallows come back to the farm each year now, they used to fill the telephone line going across the yard, now we only have 1 pair nesting in the stable this year !!

Are bat surveys still done with one of those bat detectors ?, as watching them through the thermal is so easy, I often watch them zipping about when I'm waiting out for a fox, amazed at how sometimes it's so cold, and you can still see them out hunting.

We do have an owl ringing group come to the farm,  who have a few boxes on trees, one of which a stock dove flew out of the other day (last year had 4 kestrel chicks in there😃), and barn owls in another box, all were rung, as it's not going to be easy to get to the box without some effort clearing a path, we will have to decide whether to have this brood in the barn rung.

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22 hours ago, Bob57 said:

That sounds like a nice job you have there👍, I'd say barn owls are definitely more prolific than ever, I've been foxing at night for a good 35 years now, and not many years ago it was a rare treat to see one while out, but these days I see them on every shoot I visit.

The one thing that upsets me most is how few swallows come back to the farm each year now, they used to fill the telephone line going across the yard, now we only have 1 pair nesting in the stable this year !!

Are bat surveys still done with one of those bat detectors ?, as watching them through the thermal is so easy, I often watch them zipping about when I'm waiting out for a fox, amazed at how sometimes it's so cold, and you can still see them out hunting.

We do have an owl ringing group come to the farm,  who have a few boxes on trees, one of which a stock dove flew out of the other day (last year had 4 kestrel chicks in there😃), and barn owls in another box, all were rung, as it's not going to be easy to get to the box without some effort clearing a path, we will have to decide whether to have this brood in the barn rung.

It's not a bad job really although I do more commercial (i.e. non-conservation and/or research) work than I would like these days. 

Barn Owl is a prolific breeder.  When the population crashed in the 1960s/70s, this was almost certainly a conequence of organochlorine pesticides.  Once these were banned, the population started to recover but there have been mroe recent declines too.  Lots of likely reasons behind this.....lack of food and a reduciton in available nesting sites have all been implicated.   

Swallow numbers in the UK have been falling for close to ten years now.  Most likely culprit is reduciton in insect food availability.  Almost all of our insectivorous specialists are doing badly.

For both these two birds, another problem has been a reduction in avaiable nesting sites.  

We use both thermal and infrared cameras for bat work.  Thermal cameras are excellent but none of them have a sufficiently large field of view to replace a human observer but they are great for locating roost entrances in buildings and particlarly so, roosts in trees.  Bat detectors are still used extensively because we can use the recorded calls to ID the bats.  Cameras can help with ID but cameras and recordings together are a powerful combination. 

You're spoiling your ringers cutting paths for them.  We almost always have to sort such things out ourselves and, after all, what else are trainee ringers for 🙂



 

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