BLACK DECKER Digital Thermal Leak Detector TLD100

Very useful item to find draughts etc

The product is well built, arrived quickly and I wanted to use it for tracing draughts around windows, kitchen units, doors etc. The temperature change settings are easy to understand and you set the initial temperature by simply pointing and holding the trigger on. With a little bit of practice you will find it easy to set up for the task you have. The issue is to remember when using it for things like draughts is that all internal rooms have layers of heat as all hot air rises. So if you trigger the tool at a point on the wall to set it then move the tool down 30cm it may well tell you that it is colder on the lower reading. This is not necessarily due to a draught but the ambient temperature in the room being naturally colder towards the floor. It works best if you take readings left to right of the setting temp rather than up and down. This means that you would be better running it along the bottom of a door or the windowsill rather than up and down the sides. I quickly identified areas where the colder air was in my rooms but trying to find the culprit air flow was a bit more difficult as the colder air would tend to drop which meant that I may find a cold spot but the air gap was higher up. This may sound like it's too complicated but it honestly isn't and with a little practice you may just be able to save a few pounds by finding where you are losing your heat. I haven't tried to use it in the loft yet to check for gaps in my insulation but that is the next project. Enjoy.

Very useful item to have at home. Recommend it.

Does the job. Basically point it at a surface to register a temperature in that room and turn on. Then move light around room and it will show lower or higher temperatures than the one you first you set.For example it shows my loft insulation must be missing in some parts of the ceiling as green light turns blue 🥶Some surrounding windows are colder than others.. must have a draught. All external walls register colder

This item will not pin point where’s cold or really hot just a rough area, which you can always do using your hands for drafts or touching a wall to feel if it’s cold or not, all to novelty to be honest, if you was going to need something like this for day to day work you would just buy top of the range product as this seems to be to be nothing but a children’s toy for gullible adults

I hardly need write a good review as others have noted the use of this device, but I will add a few comments.Q: How does this device differ from a standard infra-red thermometer? Why not just use one of those to identify cold bridges, leaks etc?A: you could, but it would be much harder. This device allows you to keep your eye on the area you are measuring and when the beam of light cast upon it changes colour you will know that the temperature measured has varied by half a degree, or 3 degrees, or 5, depending on the switch setting. Moving between these tolerances you can soon build up an accurate picture of where the cold and hot spots are and what might be "false triggers". You COULD do that with a standard digital thermometer, but the rapid changes of 0.1 degree would be hard to keep an eye on and to mentally collate into a picture of varying temperature. This device makes that much easier. That said, it does still require some thought to interpret what you are seeing, combined with altering the tolerance as you work.Thoughts on technique:1. If you are for example checking a wall for cold spots (e.g. cavity wall bridges) then you need to sweep horizontally across the internal wall with the reference temperature set for that height on the wall. Sweeping up and down will OF COURSE show a marked (and irrelevant) change in the temperature of the wall because the top of the wall will be warmer than the foot due to hot air in your room rising.2. When tracking draughts, one needs to hone in on them, keeping in mind that a draught, say along the floor, will cool the floor for a distance. Thus a reading of a cold floor at spot A might not indicate any problem with the floor itself, but that cold air is flowing over it from location B (the hole) a few feet or inches away. The direction of flow of the cold air can be surprising and counter intuitive, especially if you have an open fire, stove or blown air system in your house which can push and pull the draught in odd ways.3. Moving between the tolerances of 0.5 and 3 degrees is important. Too fine a tolerance and you will get distractingly false colour changes i.e. "false positives". Using the 3 deg tolerance might miss something. I would like to have seen a setting on the machine for 2 deg. That small change is important. For example: in my house, the areas around the windows have micro-leaks. This seems to cause a cooling close to the air leak of about 2 deg in winter. If I set the tolerance to 3 deg, I will miss that leak spot entirely. If I set it to 0.5 it will pick it up, but the colour indicator will be changing rapidly anyway as I move across areas that are not really a problem. The solution seems to be to move between the two tolerances while repeatedly scanning the area and take note of the pattern of change until you can hone in on the causal area, finally confirming the coldest spot (the leak) with the finest setting.Q: can you use this as a standard thermometer?A: only up to 150 deg C. So it's no use for measuring the oven temp or the jam pot.

Didn't even know this technology was available so cheaply until I stumbled across it while looking at loft insulation on Amazon. My front bedroom was always freezing even though the rest of the house was nice and warm. I'd assumed the heat was escaping through the attic and had just planned to buy loads of insulation and double up what was already there.Thought I'd try this gun first in case it wasn't the attic and there was a leak around the window or some insulation missing in the exterior wall. Very simple to use (although I had to go out and buy one of those little oblong batteries, didn't even know anything used them anymore and a shame it doesn't come with one). Set the mean temperature and the deviation then slowly move it around the walls and ceiling and watch the torch change colour as it finds cold or hot spots.What I found was that in one corner of my bedroom ceiling there was a point that was 5 degrees lower than anywhere else! Easily rectified and instead of buying 5 rolls of insulation and doing the whole loft, I just bought one and crammed it into that corner. It was right in the eaves so I couldn't see why that part wasn't as well insulated as the rest, but it's done the trick and that corer in the ceiling is only 1 degree lower than the rest now and it's noticeably warmer.So basically, buying this saved me money and time. Only doesn't get full marks because of lack of battery.

Easy to use and works well