Cool infrared thermometer

From our Go out and Buy Stuff files.

Being frugal does not have to mean being stupid, and there are some occasions where a few dollars well spent make life so much easier.

This pretty much excludes iPhones, thank you Apple, but it does include an infrared thermometer. eBay has tons, and your local ACE Hardware is the recommended place to get one.

They are non-contact devices, so you don't have to stick anything into a substance or machine or onto a surface for measuring the temperature.

Even the cheapest of the devices has an invaluable feature: it displays both Celsius and Fahrenheit at the click of a button! No pocket calculator or sweat inducing pen and paper are needed to confidently tell the German neighbor that 212 F is 100 C.

If you simply want to measure the air temperature outside of your abode, the need to don a thick coat, gloves and sunglasses in minus 20 F chills is gone. At the other end of uncomfortable, you can get the temperature in Death Valley without leaving the car.

The instructions for the device won't mention the ease of measuring the temperature of the hot water for the perfect tea, to within 0.1 degrees.

Neither will they tell you that can you return to your car some time after parking it and get a reading of the engine temperature for the sake of curiosity.

Once you have measured everything in the house that you possibly can, including the body temperature of your cat and your own foot, with and without boots, what can you do next?

Check that you have in fact measured everything in the house. There are innumerable nooks and crannies, which will take another full week of your time. Window sills and other areas where some duct or conduit goes through an outside wall are fun locations to measure in winter.

You may see jaw dropping differentials that explain where your heating money goes.

Now that you are really done, what do you do?

Go outside again and point the thermometer skyward. If there are clouds, you get an approximation of the temperature of the cloud. On a cloudless night with an air temperature of 40 or 50 F, the small screen can easily drop to minus 30 F the moment you point straight upwards.

If you had enough time, the necessary physics, math and meteorology skills, you could sit down and plot a few graphs of the ground level readout of your gadget versus the current atmospheric temperature at several altitudes.

This is not something we would do here because of a glaring lack of said skills and knowledge and also because plotting a graph sounds rather dangerous.

Incidentally, the tea water has reached the perfect temperature now, as verified by the infrared thermometer, so please excuse us while we have a cup.