Someone recently asked me, after my 15 years in this technology, what would I have liked to know in the beginning?
Infrared was in a sense a novelty in the beginning, a way to do something other bending conduit and pulling wire. I would have liked to know just how important and how large the testing or inspection method of infrared would truly become. When I first started out in infrared, the company I was working at had visions of the future and the full support of the upper management. After the Level I infrared class that I attended, I had a better understanding of how useful this tool was going to be. What I did not know was how to apply this tool in a manner that was both easy to document and repeatable. I understood the nuts and bolts of how the Infrared camera worked, but it was the process that started after the inspection that I was clueless about. To make matters worse, there really was no one within my program that I could turn to for help. I went straight from a simple electrician to an infrared program manager/supervisor/administrator/developer all at the same time (meanwhile still conducting inspections on over 4,000 pieces of electrical equipment!).
Taking images was the easy part, the reporting and recording those images proved to be the most difficult function of the new role as the plant thermograhper. It took over two years to settle on a format that was acceptable. We started with just the infrared images printed on a page, and reporting the thermal anomaly found to the person responsible for the equipment, including the information that they need to make a decision regarding what to repair and when. . This process repeated for each of the nine departments at the site and we soon realized that having nine different report templates just was not going to work. So, we decided to combine all of those into one report template that all of the departments would agree upon. That was no easy task to accomplish, and once done, the decision was made to scrap the idea and lay out an electrical template and a mechanical template. We used the input from all of the departments and condensed everything to one page per image. Everyone decided it was the best direction to take with our reporting – but boy, what a process it was!
Having a successful program, and being successful at your job, isn't just about pointing an infrared camera, taking pictures, and optimizing those pictures. One must also know the import steps of reporting and how they work with each department within a facility.