Name: I Paid $25,000 to Find This Leak
Uploaded: 2026-02-22T21:32:04.000Z
Duration: 14 min 4 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

How do you fix a problem you can't even see?

Just throw some soapy water on it and find the bubbles.

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.

You're thinking, I need more action in my life, and I agree.

Thousands of planes, choppers, tanks, and ships on our gently used War Thunder vehicles lot.

Trust me, you're gonna click the link below and try War Thunder, and you're gonna like it.

Like so many of our videos, this one was prompted by an actual problem 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.

Now, an obvious solution would be to just not have a compressed air system, but

We use it for everything from cleaning things off to cutting and polishing to hacking things apart.

And I've done a fair bit of sandblasting with it, too, Mostly for my personal motorbike project, so.

Well, see, it wouldn't be that big of a problem, and.

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.

I've never actually used this before, so I don't know how I'm gonna tell the difference between our H Vac system and air leaking out of a hose, but

Oh, there's something bouncing off this wall.

I think you'll get a lot of sounds reflecting from that sometimes.

Keep an eye on the right side and you'll see the range of frequency band that it's looking for.

I feel like I could move pretty quickly at this point.

I think we've found something right there.

Okay, but would I even be able to hear this?

I would have to be within like 10 inches of it, though.

One to go, and that took like two minutes.

Once you know what you're looking for, it stands out like a beacon.

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.

Hey, two cool people can have the same cool idea at the same time.

Separate from the video mode, you can put it in leak queue 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.

Like, that's the whole thing with a leak.

Like 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 gonna go see what else this thing can do.

The magic of this device is really in its algorithm and precise calibration.

This array of 64 microphones is arranged in a logarithmic spiral that 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.

with a little bit of maths, the source can be determined by analyzing the reception delays.

Its microphones pick up Sound between 2 kilohertz and 100 kilohertz, 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 drip, drip, drip might actually be too low for the fluke to pick up.

Why not turn our liquid leak into an air leak?

All we need to do is pressurize our loop.