Yes Dan…
And they are few and far between! (And I am not one of them either).
These camera owners are cutting their own throat, and ours. Just like home inspectors.
They all wonder why I get so hostile to their inadequacies as they spread their inabilities across the industry.
Nobody can pay $5000 for thermal imaging camera, never mind the cost of training required to do it right. Just like their home inspection, they want to skim on by and make claims that they can’t back up and then come here and wonder why they are courting litigation.
So far, there is little litigation associated with thermal imaging and home inspections. However this is because no one will sue you about something they don’t understand in the first place. The general public is becoming much more savvy with thermal imaging and all these claims of moisture in the ceiling that aren’t, will start coming out of camera owners pocketbooks.
These are the inspectors that can’t seem to read and understand the inspection standards, never mind the laws of physics, psychrometrics and thermodynamics associated with thermal imaging.
To be perfectly honest with you, I can’t make a buck on thermal imaging when associated with a home inspection either. I must separate the two.
And that sir is the key.
Many look at thermal imaging as if “if you build it they will come”, but if you don’t talk about thermal imaging at all and use your home inspection as a base site evaluation you can sell thermal imaging as a follow-up to document and analyze the issues identified in the home inspection and your client does not associate the combination of the two.
“Recommend further evaluation by a roofing contractor” needs to be turned into, let me perform a thermal imaging scan on this apparent roof leak.
Well, it’s hard enough to get $569 fees just for the home inspection, when you’re competing with $299.
I use thermal imaging on practically every home inspection that I do regardless. It is basically a high-efficiency flashlight! And that’s what everyone else here is doing.
If they continue to do this, they will continue to get what they always got. They can’t even recover from a $250 investment in an IR Camera from what the net is out of the home inspection with IR, never mind a $25,000 camera.
I have a 794,000 ft.² building evaluation tonight off of a 14,000 ft.² flat roof inspection that I did last week. The roofing contractor was looking for roof leaks and I turned it into a refrigerated building performance issue. So you can even do this type of conversion on the big jobs.