Is thisinfrared thermometer any good?

LMC-

After seeing your post yesterday, I stopped by Sears to check it out. The one in the local store had the $79 price tag, with no evidence that it could be had for less.

I spent $50 for a smaller IR thermometer at Radio Shack. It works OK, although it doesn't have the LASER pointer or the extremely high temperature range of the Sears unit. I took mine apart and didn't see any way to calibrate it, so they must select components in the factory to set its accuracy.

You might see if you can find the Sears unit in the parts department of their web site. Sometimes they have a diagram available in addition to a parts list.

Fred

It's in a Craftsman flyer dated Oct 22-28, page 3. Here are scans of the front and page 3:

There were lots of these flyers in the tool dept. at Kmart (some are now called Sears Essentials), but they didn't have the thermometer in stock, so I had to visit a regular Sears store.

This Craftsman thermometer turns out to be an ExTech model 42510. Amazon.com had its user manual available for download, but nothing in it mentioned calibration. However, the inside of my throat measured

98.4F, so I guess the accuracy is OK. :)

While searching for infrared thermometers, I found a downloadable book forecasting the worldwide growth in sales of handheld infrared thermometers:

Only $795.00!!!

I briefly looked at these type thermometers a year or two ago. They didn't seem to be able to cover a small enough area. Has this changed, was I mistaken or is their a way around it?. IOW can you check an individual transistor or resistor? When I looked before it seemed doubtful a CPU heatsink sized area could be read accurately. That was the killer for me.

This particular Sears/Extech 42510 has a distance/spot ratio of 8, meaning fhat, at a distance of 4", it measures tempearture over a spot

0.5" diameter. But I saw some much more expensive Raytek thermometers where the d/s was of 50 or even 130, like this $226 ST60-SB:

BTW, be careful when buying products from Sears because they've implemented a 15% restocking fee on some of them.

didn't

me.

Thanks. At least that's within reason. And for the heads up on fee.

LMC-

I printed your scans and took them to Sears. They didn't argue at all. They sold me one at the sale price even though the sale had expired.

I found the Extech user's manual at their web site. It is obviously the same unit, although I suspect theirs doesn't come with the Craftsman red-and-black color scheme.

I noticed that Sears has the 2%/4 degree error spec across the entire range, while Extech has a 1%/1.8 Degree spec from 60 to 113 Degrees F.

Thanks for the heads-up and the scans.

Fred