How a Police IR helicopter functions?

[Ax3]

hey guys on a seed bank's site i came across a guide on indoor security whilst growing.

One mention from this guide was

Do not have hot, smelly exhaust air from your grow room pouring outside directly. Police IR helicopters can see the heat pouring out like a fountain. The helicopters CAN NOT see through your walls and detect your grow lights. They can only see heat on the outside of a building. So if your growroom is insulated and the lights are not touching the walls you are fine.

So my question/s are the drug detection helicopters in melbourne [and australia] functioning in the same way as described above?

My other query was in regards to this excerpt (last sentence of the above quote) "..and the lights are not touching the walls you are fine."

Now what does this mean exactly? If the lights were touching the walls [and by what sense would the lights be 'touching'] would that somehow emit heat to the outside of the building and thus be detected by the IR helicopters?

Writing this all up now i seem to have gained a slightly better understanding of the above, however if your grow room is in a concrete room under your garage i cannot see how a light touching a wall would make the outside walls hot?

Sorry about being so confusing again, this is all in preperation for my first grow, and the only time im motivated to spend time doing research and gathering information is when im high, which makes conversation slightly incomprehensible

 

[TheWheelman]

From what I understand about Helicopter Cams is that if you have a Grow HOUSE then your roof appears to be hotter than the other houses in the area. You said you want to grow under your garage, Right? So its a basement grow. With concrete walls and a garage above. Just don't run a lot of High Heat Lamps and turn your basement into a sauna,lol. Just make sure that you have adequate ventilation and if it is too hot put some AC in there. Good Luck

 

[simpsonsampson420]

here is how a police helicopter works...

first it can only read surface temps of your house.... this means they only "see" the outside of the walls or the roof... during the summer it isnt an issue as roof temps can easily hit 150f+... and exterior walls can get quite warm also...

in the cooler months what they look for isnt the heat signature from your lights, but whether you have a room that shows up noticably warmer than other rooms in your house.. this really only affects the top story rooms in a 2 story house as it is hard for them to get a good reading on the side of your house if you live in a neighborhood due to having neighbors...

now lets say they find a room that shows up warmer.. then they might start investingating it by sending the chopper over it at different times to see if there are heat patterns that would be consistant with a grow op... if the room shows up warm on a 12/12 cycle or 18/6 cycle, for example, then they may further investigate...

they will also look for flurs, which are spouts of hot air, leaving a room... your dryer vent creates a IR flur if you were to look at it... more than 1 flur, a flur somewhere where there is obviously going to be no dryer at, or flurs that are at timed intervals from exhaust fans being on timers are also good indications of a grow op...

usually even with all this "evidence" they still need more to get a warrant... so they may send a cop to walk around the premisis to see if they hear, smell, or see anything that may resemble a grow op.. if they do, they proceed from there to try to obtain a search warrant...

now if you are an attic grower it causes a little more of a problem because directly above your lights can easily create a hot spot that would appear on your roof.. it is important to light cool your lights in your attic to keep the hot spots from appearing, have good air circulation to keep the air temp in the attic even, or cover your interior of the attic with IR blocker... this keeps them from being able to read any further in than the blocker is setup...

 

[rustybud]

u hav set my mind at ease .. cheers that was gd read ..

 

[RickWhite]

You guys are all way off. See my thread "Beating thermal imaging."

Themrmal imaging if used at night can clearly see a man walking around in his basement. In the hot summer day the roof would block it because it would just make a big red patch over the whole house - just look at the thread. Also, search youtube for footage and you can see it in action.

 

[ejf1676]

post a link rick?

 

[doobnVA]

You guys are all way off. See my thread "Beating thermal imaging."

Themrmal imaging if used at night can clearly see a man walking around in his basement. In the hot summer day the roof would block it because it would just make a big red patch over the whole house - just look at the thread. Also, search youtube for footage and you can see it in action.

Thermal imaging and infrared imaging are two different things. Neither of them can see heat through walls or ceilings the way you've described. Just because you saw a video on the internet that seemed to show that, does not mean it's true.

The previous poster is correct, IR cannot see through walls, ceilings, etc. It simply reads the surface temperatures of things. IF your lights are radiating enough heat and your grow area is poorly insulated then the heat will probably be visible on IR. IR is essentially useless during the day, especially in the summer when it's hot outside.

HERE are some videos of infrared in action. Watch the second video in the list. You'll notice that you can't see any people inside the homes, because they are inside - and IR just can't see them.

I'd love to see this alleged "thermal imaging" video where you can see a man in his basement (through a roof and multiple levels of a home) and he glows "red"... since heat appears white and cold is black.

 

[doobnVA]

Here's another video, this one I found on Youtube. Notice again how the roofs of the houses are black, and the people are glowing white. Can't see anyone through the roofs of any of these houses either.

 

[simpsonsampson420]

You guys are all way off. See my thread "Beating thermal imaging."

Themrmal imaging if used at night can clearly see a man walking around in his basement. In the hot summer day the roof would block it because it would just make a big red patch over the whole house - just look at the thread. Also, search youtube for footage and you can see it in action.

it doesnt matter... whether it shows up white or shows up red... THEY ARE STILL UNABLE TO PENETRATE THROUGH WALLS OR OTHER SOLID SURFACES.. THEY ARE ONLY ABLE TO READ SURFACE TEMPS... if you notice in the last youtube video link that was posted you cant see into anyones houses.. you dont see johnny sitting playing his xbox with friends, or the neighbors dog inside running around, or anything else.... you just see the heat from under the car from the exhaust and the man when he leaves the car and runs... different cameras can be set up to read different signatures, but they all have the same thing in common, and that is ONLY SURFACE TEMPS CAN BE READ...


and i want to make a correction... its flir.. not flur... i hit the wrong key...

 

[matthew]

I have this poster in my office, it is the electromagnetic radiation spectrum and would be a good thing for any grower to read up on.

Infrared is just a little lower on the spectrum than visible light so it is not going to see through walls. On the other hand thermal imaging CAN see heat sources through walls. I can build a "mythbusters" style shack to building code, brick, insulation, everything, then put a 400 watt HPS in it and see right through the walls.

The thing to remember here though is range. The supreme court ruled in Kyllo v. United States that looking at your house from the street with a thermal imaging device is actually a "search" under the 4th amendment and will require a warrant (as well as the probable cause that a warrant entails).

Us growers need to take a page from warplane designers since most of us vent our exhaust (hopefully filtered) outside. Many earlier anti-aircraft missiles worked on the principle of seeking out the greatest heat source. When fired at an aircraft that is going away from you the weapon will seek out exhaust hot and destroy the aircraft. Aircraft engineers figured out a great many ways to combat these by either moving the engines away from the cockpit (the A-10) or distributing the heat over a wider area so as to dissipate it (F-117, F-22, B-2...)

We need to use the second approach so that our exhaust air is not only smelling the same as the outside air (don't want your neighbors wondering why your basement always smells like fabreeze) and the same temperature as the outside air.

For the most part there are really no easy ways to "hide" your grow from thermal imagine. That being said if the police already have enough PC to get a warrent so they can use thermal, you are probably already busted and they are just looking for a little icing on the cake for the DA.

 

[matthew]

it doesnt matter... whether it shows up white or shows up red... THEY ARE STILL UNABLE TO PENETRATE THROUGH WALLS OR OTHER SOLID SURFACES.. THEY ARE ONLY ABLE TO READ SURFACE TEMPS... if you notice in the last youtube video link that was posted you cant see into anyones houses.. you dont see johnny sitting playing his xbox with friends, or the neighbors dog inside running around, or anything else.... you just see the heat from under the car from the exhaust and the man when he leaves the car and runs... different cameras can be set up to read different signatures, but they all have the same thing in common, and that is ONLY SURFACE TEMPS CAN BE READ...


and i want to make a correction... its flir.. not flur... i hit the wrong key...

FLIR or Forward Looking InfraRed is generally mounted to the nose of a helo and you are correct, they are used for seeing people running at night, not spotting grows. This should give you a little better idea of what the original design was for:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/796272/apache_helicopter_strike/

That being said thermal CAN be used to find grows, not by "seeing through walls" but the heat of a room (be that from an HPS, a large group of people, a large aquarium.....) will show up on an outside wall. For instance if I drive through your neighboorhood at 3am on wensday morning almost every single house will be blue on a thermal imager. However if you happened to have a 1000 watt HPS or 2 in the basement it is going to glow like the 4th of July.

 

[simpsonsampson420]

http://www.prtech-thermalimaging.com/products/infrared_in_action/fact_fiction.htm

again.. they CAN NOT SEE THROUGH WALLS, CEILINGS, ROOFS, OR EVEN GLASS...

 

[simpsonsampson420]

http://www.prtech-thermalimaging.com/products/infrared_thermal_imaging-about/how_infrared_technology_works.html

 

[simpsonsampson420]

http://www.psinspection.com/infrared.html

 

[simpsonsampson420]

do i need to keep going??

 

[Bob Marley Chiefs]

do i need to keep going??

i love it... all three sites say no we can not see through walls.....if anyone is worried about it go spend some money and build a false wall with a small space in between the walls of your grow room.... air condition that space, its that easy...500 dollars and 15-20 hours, or an asshole more torn than a wet piece of tissue paper.....

 

[simpsonsampson420]

ive been trying to say it from the beginning.. its one area that people tend to freak out WAY more than they need too...

 

[SableZen]

I've frequently used NVGs that combined both ambient amplification along with IR from helicopters at night (more sophisticated than what law enforcement uses). And not once was I ever able to see any details about what was going on inside of a building/house.

One can only see external surface areas of buildings and their temperature - aka the amount of heat saturating through the walls/roof that makes it to being radiated into outdoor air. There's not much more to it than that. So venting hot air directly outside is very detectable - worry about that. And windows really do usually just appear as dead spots - FLIR won't even see through windows, let alone a roof - so don't worry about that as far as IR goes.

There are other things out there that can see through roofs... but those systems are radar based or use millimeter-wave technology. Fortunately, cost is very prohibitive so law enforcement hasn't been using any other type of imaging technology like that as far as I know.

 

[hippiepudz024]

AAAAAAAAAAAHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh thank you simsonsamson you really put me at my chi , now i fully realize how those damn things work thankx man +rep

 

[RickWhite]

I'm not an expert on all the latest technologies but I'm telling you I saw a video of a police helicopter following a fleeing suspect and this technology showed every thing inside every house they flew over. The hottest things were red in the middle followed by yellow and finally blue rings as the coolest. Just before the guy blows his brains out in some guys back yard you can see the man walking around inside the house along with every single incandescent bulb in the house and the heat signature of every appliance.

I think you guys are looking at old outdated technology. Don't let your assumptions bite you in the ass.