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Best practice dictates that infrared inspection results be documented in a written report. Such reports should clearly define who performed the inspection, how and when it was conducted, and what equipment or structure was inspected. This information, along with imagery and a detailed description of conditions or problems found should be included in the thermographer’s final report.

Many thermal imagers automatically record corresponding daylight photographs for each thermal image captured. For imagers that do not have this feature or when higher quality photos are desired, one may use a separate digital camera.In doing so, it is important to duplicate the imager’s viewing angle and select a distance that provides the same perspective in both the thermal and daylight images.

If you are a thermographer, you know how important it is to have the correct imager.  Equally important is your report writing software.  Properly designed software enables you to quickly generate reports thereby spending less time doing paperwork and more time performing inspections.

If your thermal imager has multiple color palettes, you may wonder, ‘Which palette is best?’  For applications such as electrical systems, monochrome may be less confusing.  Multicolor palettes can provide an advantage when imaging targets where exceptions exhibit small delta T’s or when imaging targets with several discrete temperature zones.  When in doubt, thermographers should include both monochrome and color thermograms in their final report.

An infrared inspection isn’t over until the paperwork is finished.  Although conducting inspections can be an adventure, the attendant paperwork can be tedious.  Having the correct software can make a thermographer’s job easier by drastically reducing reporting time while organizing data into a format that is useful and easy to understand.