BigShinyThing

Funny how the US blogs often get the scoop on news happening just round the corner. Or maybe it’s just that the Haringey Independent doesn’t think Spy Planes Over Haringey is lurid enough to rate a headline. Anyway. The ever-excellent BLDGBLOG reports that the Borough has employed top-notch spook gear to create a street-by-street map of energy squanderers:

An aircraft, fitted with a military-style thermal imager, flew over the borough 17 times to take pictures of almost every house in the area. Footage of heat loss was converted into stills, then laid over a map of the area, before each house was given colour-coded ratings. Homes that were losing the most heat were represented as bright red on the map. The least wasteful households were shown in deep blue. Shades of paler blues and reds were used to show grades of heat loss.

Evidently, the process is called hot-mapping, which has a suitably CSI-meets-24 milspeak ring to it.

The maps are available online.

Call us suspicious, but the last time we heard tell of government using such technologies on their unsuspecting citizens, it was to track the infrared footprint of the local indoor dope farms. But I’m sure that doesn’t go on in Haringey. Ever. Especially in those oh-so hot terraces on Cecile Park (see above).