I Paid $25,000 to Find This Leak

How do you fix a problem you can't even see? In smaller systems, it's not that hard. Air leak on your tire, just throw some soapy water on it and find the bubbles. Easy. But in a larger system, like our workshop's compressed air hoses, it could take a fluke to find a tiny leak somewhere. A Fluke II 915 acoustic imager, to be exact. This $25,000 handheld camera does not work like a normal camera. You know, taking in light and transforming it into internet cloud. Instead, it takes in sound and uses it to find leaks and equipment malfunctions, even detecting noises beyond the range of human hearing. It then represents that audio like a heat map. So, let's see if we can use it to find some really useful stuff like the leak in our system and maybe even a segue to our sponsor. Shut your trap, computer man. It's okay. I got this. Look at me. You're thinking I need more action in my life. And I agree. Bam. Look at that. Thousands of planes, choppers, tanks, and ships on our gently used War Thunder vehicles lot. Trust me, you're going to click the link below and try War Thunder, and you're going to like it. Ask me how I know. Later though, I'm busy. Like so many of our videos, this one was prompted by an actual problems that obviously it helps a little that we shoot most of our workshop videos on the other side of this wall, but it's still been a major source of disruptions over the last few years. Now, an obvious solution would be to just not have a compressed air system, but that's not really an option. We use it for everything from cleaning things off to cutting and polishing to hacking things apart. Excuse me. And I've done a fair bit of sand blasting with it, too. Mostly for my personal motorbike project. So, okay, we need an air compressor. Deal with it, right? Well, see, it wouldn't be that big of a problem. Except that somewhere in the system is a leak. So, the compressor goes off way more often, disrupting us way more often than it needs to. That's where Fluke's acoustic imager comes in. Theoretically, with this, in a matter of minutes, I should be able to track down the leak, saving us both time and money. Theoretically, I'm going to put that to the test. I've never actually used this before, so I don't know how I'm going to tell the difference between our HVAC system and air leaking out of a hose, but presumably, it's pretty easy. Wow, there's something in this wall. Oh, there's something bouncing off this wall. I think you'll get a lot of sounds reflecting from that. Sometimes that makes sense. Keep an eye on the right side and you'll see the range of frequency band that it's looking for. Okay, I feel like I could move pretty quickly at this point. Oh, hello, Captain. I think we've found something right there. Okay, but would I even be able to hear this? Oh, I can. I would have to be within like 10 inches of it though. One to go. And that took like two minutes. Oh jeez. Okay. Once you know what you're looking for, it stands out like a beacon. Oh yeah, this one's a lot more obvious. So between these two, this one was a pretty substantial one. We found both of them within just a couple minutes. This is a lot like the video Adam Savage did with this thing. Okay, two cool people can have the same cool idea at the same time. Adam Savage and Electroboom and also me, just slower. I want to show you guys separate from the video mode, you can put it in leak Q mode. This allows you to take a picture of a leak. Then according to your settings, so gas price, compression, energy cost, as well as your currency, it will tell you how much that leak is going to cost you here. I had no idea that just a little air leak could cost $45 a year. So, replacing the fitting is a no-brainer. That assumes it's running all year. I mean, it is running all year. We never turn it off. Like, that's the whole thing with a leak. It's like a faucet, right? Like a every once in a while drip will waste like more gallons in a month than you could possibly fathom. Now, obviously, if the only gases you're working with are compressed air, it would take a little while for an investment like this to pay for itself. But in certain industries, this could be worth its weight in gold in cost savings. Now, while the workshop team gets those fittings sorted out, I'm going to go see what else this thing can do. The magic of this device is really in its algorithm and precise calibration. The hardware itself is pretty simple. This array of 64 microphones is arranged in a logarithmic spiral to capture sound, and it uses beam forming to determine the source of the sound. Then it overlays that on the camera image as what Fluke calls a sound map. In the default mode, a sound map looks an awful lot like a heat map. All of this is possible because the microphones are all in known locations relative to both each other as well as to the camera right in the center. So sound hits the array and with a little bit of maths, the source can be determined by analyzing the reception delays. There are some limitations though. Its microphones pick up sound between 2 kHz and 100 kHz, which is well above the range of human hearing. So if you wanted to find something like a small liquid leak, say in our water cooling loop here, the frequency of a of a drip drip drip might actually be too low for the fluke to pick up. Fortunately, we have an idea for that. Why not turn our liquid leak into an air leak? All we need to do is pressurize our loop. Well, that was easy. Oh, you put a hole in the tube. Usually the leaks are a lot smaller than that in these water cooling systems. I kind of want to know if it can handle a much smaller leak, like uh an, you know, an O-ring issue or something. Every once in a while, especially on hardline fittings, these O-rings will go missing and the system can look like it's all sealed up, but and when that drip gets on the back of your GPU, h you're going to have a pretty bad time. Put this up in the blue zone. You can see even though there's no O-ring in there, it's sealed right now. But let's see if our fluke can pick it up. Oh, dude. Easy. And that is a much much smaller leak. What a trouble saver that would be. Now, it is worth noting that our brilliant strategy of just emptying the loop and pumping it up isn't going to work in every situation. Clean rooms, for instance, need to maintain strict control of airborne contaminants. And one of the ways that they do this is by building them to be fairly airtight and to maintain positive pressure inside. Not a ton of pressure cuz like humans need to work in there, uh, but some pressure. So, how would they track down then a low pressure leak? Turns out the answer is Fluke's Beacon. This little device emits sound at 40,000 hertz, well beyond what would bother any human. You just pop it into your system, seal it up, tune it to 40,000 hertz, and theoretically, we should be able to find our leak. I can definitely detect it through the acrylic now, but our system may be too complex for such a short wavelength to travel through like that. It's probably just because this knows there's sound coming from here or somewhere off the side and so it's not going to pick up the same frequency somewhere else. Hold it up over there then. Oh, dude. Bingo. You know what? This would be a great opportunity to check the multiple source feature here. Ooh, yeah. So, in acoustics, we can click multiple sources and then Oh, dude, that's so cool. It'll show the different levels. However, those still totally overpower it. Really? Yeah. that really doesn't care about this leak unless it's the only one on screen. Very interesting. Wonder what else we could use this for. A really cool application for acoustic imagers is identifying problems with transmission towers at a distance, say from the ground. It apparently works at up to 120 m or 393 ft and can be used to detect partial discharge or arcing, the sort of thing that could lead to a forest fire. Now, we don't have anything like that to test, but we do have some whiny electronics like this GPU that has some coil wine. Now, coil wine isn't dangerous like those transmission tower problems. It's just vibrations in board components, specifically the coils, as electricity passes through. It's just it can be pretty flipping annoying. Now, you can see that I'm not picking anything up right now. That's because this GPU isn't under load. Let's just plug in our keyboard using a handydandy spec cable from ltstore.com and fire up a GPU inensive application. There it is. But where is it coming from specifically? There's a hot spot right where the 12vt 2x6 comes into the back of the board. Yep, it's right across the back of the card where all the VRM would be. Doesn't really help us solve the problem, but now we know. Actually, I had another situation very recently where coil wine was driving me absolutely nuts. I use these USB fiber optic docks in order to have my system downstairs, but my monitor and all of my peripherals upstairs. I was hearing this like high-pitched almost like a CRT TV in the next room whine. I was like, can anyone else hear that? Where's that coming from? And everyone's looking at me like I'm crazy. I'm having trouble getting it to go lower. Change the decibb from automatic to manual. It's trouble though when you get into the low frequencies because if you talk you can actually see it exactly when it's something that you can hear like go wine it's always going to be in the frequency that we can hear so it can be a little bit of trouble right at like 10,000 hertz. That's not even that high pitch. Why couldn't anybody else hear this? It was driving me freaking nuts. Like can everyone can hear 10,000 hertz, right? Some with hearing loss or significant age- related hearing decline might struggle to detect it. So you shouldn't have had any problems. Listen. Listen. It's really cool how adjusting the frequency band as well as the sensitivity can really help you dial it in to detect particular things. Of course, your next question is probably, "But what can I do about coil wine liners?" Some people have reported success putting over these vibrating components, but your mileage, not to mention your warranty, may vary. Is this kind of analysis a practical application for such an expensive device? Yeah, probably not. But there are more affordable options for this sort of thing. The Fluke III500 is about $85,000 but is just limited to the leak Q functionality that we showed you guys earlier with a more limited frequency band. Our II15 has some added functions like mech, which detects things like a faulty bearing in an assembly line to help identify and fix problems during planned downtime rather than when they just come up unexpectedly. But if you want to go even cheaper, you totally can. Other options are out there and there are even open- source acoustic imagers. The Centenna, a modular system, looks like a standout. Of course, that sort of thing means that the calibration is entirely up to the user. If you're a business, well, you might not want to deal with that. All right. Do you think they're done with the fixes in the shop? How'd all the fixes go? We're thinking the regulator was leaking. It may have been the hose, but we swapped both out. I wanted to replace the hoses anyway. The connection before was questionable at best. Tore the regulator down, rebuilt it, and no leaks at all. Sometimes you just have to take it apart and put it back together. This one was a little bit different. I knew that there was a leak in here cuz this wasn't tight enough, but I discovered that there was also an O-ring missing in her fasteners. Just completely missing. Yeah. I was actually quite surprised that it wasn't leaking worse than it was, but we ended up getting it put back in and now it's good and tight. So, that was never in there. No. This whole time? Yeah. So, it was only the two leaks. That was it. Well, then what is this that I'm picking up right now? I knew it. It's another segue to our sponsor. Wow. Wow. Kind of rude, but it's okay. I can take it. Hey, Johnny Thunder here from Johnny's War Machine Emporium. If you're looking for a gently used fighting vehicle that's seen actual combat in War Thunder, the most comprehensive vehicle combat game ever made, come on down and join our 95 million satisfied customers from Rancho Cucamonga to Calamazoo. We're talking choppers, whoppers, showstoppers, mom and poppers, ornithopters if they were real. Not yet. Oh. Oh, you want boats? 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If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the one we did on a Caterpillar branded smartphone that has a Fleer thermal camera built into it. That was pretty cool.