Find heat losses in the district heating network by thermal imaging
Municipal utilities find heat losses in district heating networks using thermal imaging
Fits: Production, engineering & maintenance
A thermal imaging survey flight in winter shows warm spots above the pipes. The AI matches them with the route plan, filters out typical false sources and suggests the suspect spots your network staff should check first.
Is this for you?
- You operate a district heating network with older sections and unexplained heat losses or high make-up water demand.
- Your digital route plan is positionally accurate enough to assign warm spots to a pipe.
- You can commission a survey flight in winter and then check the suspect spots on site.
Take a thermal image from an earlier survey flight or from ground thermography along a known route, without people and without addresses, and describe the course of the pipe in words. Use the template below to have anomalies and possible false sources listed, and compare with what you found on site.
How to go about it
- Define network sections and the damage you are looking for
- Plan the survey flight in winter
- Collect known damage sites and false sources
- Match the thermal image with the route plan and set thresholds
- Pass suspect spots to network maintenance
- Evaluate false reports after every survey flight
Templates to copy
The complete guide
- 6 steps explaining exactly what to do
- 3 proven templates to copy into your own AI
- Safe use: data, checking, deciding, informing
- Pitfalls, effort and how to recognise success
With the training you get all 430 guides for as long as your access runs.
Same approach, other use cases
24 more use cases follow the pattern “Inspecting by camera”.
EV-07 · Legal status 08.10.2026