lidl infra red thermometer

[Ron]

Is this lidl infra red thermometer any good?

[newshound]

Colour change looks a bit gimmicky to me tbh. Some of the cheap "pistol" types have a laser for aiming, which is quite useful. I don't think this one does.

I'd have said that this one was better value

[Brian Gaff]

Pity they don't do a talking one as well. Brian

[Adrian]

probe-%C2%A317-99-lidl

Looks like the usual £9 eBay one with a respray. The eBay ones definitely do have the laser spot.

[Adrian]

temperature-

Re-reading the blurb, the reference temp thing is something the eBay ones don't do, but if you can compare two numbers on your own...

Also - only 220degC max?

[Muddymike]

I bought one last time around. It does have a laser, I used it to balance radiators which it seemed to do well. I don't know how accurate the readings are but they were good enough for me.

Mike

[Ron]

Is this lidl infra red thermometer any good?

As I had to go to Lidl again ( I forgot something) I decided to buy it as Lidl have a 28 day return policy.

Good job they have, it is highly inaccurate.

Pointed it at a boiling kettle and it registers 86 deg C, thermometer in greenhouse registering 15 deg C it reads 8.1 deg C

It is going back.

Wondering if the cheap Ebay one will be more accurate?

[Adrian]

The contents of my freezer appear to be -19degC, and the (metal) kettle appears to click off at 102degC.

[Andrew Gabriel]

IR thermometers are usually calibrated for surfaces with an emmisivity of 0.95 which is good enough for most things, but certain things are significantly lower and give very inaccurate readings, such as most shiny metal surfaces, and bare copper in particular (even if not shiny).

[Dave Liquorice]

Shiny metal kettle or matt black paint?

Thermometer reading air temp, IR the temp of what it was pointed at ie the structure. If your weather has been like ours recently it's pretty cold at night.

[Ron]

Shiny metal kettle or matt black paint?

Thermometer reading air temp, IR the temp of what it was pointed at ie the structure. If your weather has been like ours recently it's pretty cold at night.

[The Other Mike]

No, you are just using it wrong. A shiny kettle and a glass bulb on a thermometer are guaranteed to read incorrectly.

A piece of black tape (matt gaffer) stuck on a surface will give you much more accurate readings. Blue 3M masking tape works well too.

[fred]

If you use PVC tape you can get it off again :-)

Useful range of colours too, I've just put some inch square patches in white on some rads due for balancing and I'll prob just leave them on for when I do it again. PVC, whatever the colour, seems to be pretty good emmisivity wise and better than a painted rad surface. Def better than copper if you choose to target the pipes.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

What sort of kettle? If it has a reflective finish it will give a false reading. Works best on matt black.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Almost anything, including white paint, works fine. Colour in the visible spectrum has almost no correlation with emissivity in the infra-red.

[Andy Burns]

A shiny chrome kettle? try putting a square of masking tape on it, then measuring the temperature of that ...

[Robin]

There are talking non-contact IR thermometers for clinical use which you can point at foreheads or tear ducts instead of sticking in ears. But they only cover around 30 to 44 degrees.

If Brian wants one for wider use, such as telling when the oven lining is cool enough to scrub or when the temperature of a frying pan is high enough for the egg, I don't know of any source in the UK.

[Johny B Good]

Most likely if my 3 or 4 quid purchase from the "Maplin Man" stall in a local fleamarket a few years back is any guide (the ebay one looks pretty similar to mine).

I've just taken a reading of my weather station with it and got a reading of 22.6 deg C versus the weather station's own internal reading of 22.2 deg C (also ditto for a cheap Wx station reading 22.4 and wall thermometer reading just a tad under 24 deg).

I can't recall the temperature reading range but I'm pretty certain I was able to get 400+ deg C readings off my lad's motorcycle exhaust pipes and I do recall night time clear sky temperature readings lower than -20 deg C.

I've had a look at Maplin's IR thermometer range but can't find the particular model I've got (probably, like inkjet printers, on account of it being an obsolete model that's no longer manufactured).

The price range covers from a low of £29.99 to a high of £570.24 (a Fluke 568 Multipurpose Thermometer which covers the range -40 to +800 deg C). I can't help feeling I got a bit of a bargain for my "3 or 4 quid (it might have been as high as 8 quid)" purchase. :-)

[Johny B Good]

My body temperature is 36 (mouth reading).

You can't directly measure air temperature, only objects with an emmisivity of 95% that happen to be at air temperature. If you try to measure the sky on a clear cold winter's night, you're likely to see sub -20 deg readings, depending on how dry the upper atmosphere is.

I just pointed my own IR thermometer out of the open window at the night sky about 20 minutes ago (as it happened, just as our local police chopper was flying across the portion of sky I was aiming for - I'm half expecting a knock on the door since the thermometer includes a sub milliwatt class 2 laser pointer) and got a reading of +5.2 deg so I know we must have cloud cover tonight even though I can't actually it through the window of a lit up room.

[Johny B Good]

Even that ruse is likely to give an under-reading due to the thermal gradient across the tape. I actually 'painted' a spot on my office radiator using black felt tip to improve the accuracy of the reading compared to the white painted surface and, I have to say, it made bugger all difference.

I think the black plastic electric kettle only mamanges to give a reading of 86 deg C when it's merrily boiling away. I'm putting that one down to 'thermal gradient'. Polished metal surfaces are even worse but only on account of their much lower emmissivity (I don't have an old fashioned chrome steel electric kettle to try the 'black ink' spot experiment on).