Inspecting and documenting water damage has always been a huge time-sink for restoration companies. This fact has been eased somewhat thanks to advancing technology, but many companies are still spending a ton of time documenting and finishing work done on water-damaged properties.
That’s because, even as the technology available to on-site workers has gotten far more advanced, most companies continue to handle the data they collects in a disorganized and inefficient way. Now, though, there’s a better way to assess the damage and get started on a job.
Using a moisture meter before the introduction of IR was time-consuming in the extreme. The old solution to measure moisture levels in a wall or another property feature required the technician to take many readings in order to find the whole of the affected area. The simple numerical readings of a moisture meter also don’t show any context about the property, and often leave technicians trying to explain things verbally.
The use of a moisture meter to find the area of damage was simply too time-consuming, and introduced too much room for error. If the technician took a reading even a few inches off, the reading would be totally off – meaning that readings had to be taken densely even over small areas. Technicians were wasting valuable time fighting with compliance requirements and the tech they were given by their employers.
Thankfully, there was a better way coming.
When IR cameras were added to the on-site technician’s restoration tool belt, the difficulty of dealing with water damage work went down dramatically. Not only could an IR image show the potential extents of a leak or instance of water damage in a single reading, but it presented its readings as part of an image where the layout of the room remained visible.
Not only does this “moisture mapping” approach require fewer moisture meter readings, but the relevance of those readings are also far more obvious, with less note-taking needed about the space. The paradigm shifted from “measure, measure, and measure again” to “locate, measure, and move on ASAP”.
Now, some products like the FLIR MR277 even integrate IR imagery and moisture meter functionality so technicians can have a single, easy-to-use solution in the field.
By offering integration with Teledyne’s FLIR IR camera, RocketPlan can use its cloud-based platform to solve these problems. IR images from FLIR are taken into the same cloud storage system as any other image on RocketPlan, meaning that IR images remain auto-associated with the correct date, worker, property, room, and damage type – forever.
As a result, RocketPlan finally combines IR imaging with the full restoration workflow, both before and after work begins. This means that IR images are now just as efficient to take, organize, report, and review as anything else. That’s a revolution in the InsurTech and PropTech spaces, preventing water damage from being associated with high costs, long timelines, and frequent headaches.
With RocketPlan, the most complex and data-heavy projects are no harder to complete than the simplest projects of all – a first for the industry, and a revolution for project managers and rank-and-file technicians alike.
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