this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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hmmm
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For things that are "hmmm".
Rule 1: All post titles except for meta posts should be just plain "hmmm" and nothing else, no emotes, no capitalisation, no extending it to "hmmmm" etc.
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IR thermometers aren't particularly accurate. Especially when pointed at reflective surfaces like glass, where some of the return will actually be reflected heat coming from you.
Most wall thermostats are designed to read the temperature of the air; the wall behind may be warmer or colder.
This is why it's important to get one with an adjustable emissivity, so you can adjust it to whatever material you are measuring. Or you can stick some electrical tape on what you want to measure, 3M super 88 is 0.96 so I just set my fluke to 0.96 and stick that shit everywhere I want to measure.
But 88 is trash my dude
I'm a 33 man
This is correct. Specifically for the honeywells, they have little holes to measure air temperature usually on the top or bottom depending on model. The smart ones (like this one is) can also be manually calibrated up or down from what their internal thermostat says if there's a known deviation (i.e. the wall is consistently putting off enough heat to throw off the stat).
Also the electronics in the thermostat might be generating juuuust enough heat to make a difference depending on where the IR thermometer is pointing
Or, - hear me out - covid was a hoax
Why is this joke downvoted? It would make no sense to take this at face value unless we assume you are extremely mentally ill