We’re going to open up our office this coming Monday (May 4th), in addition to the usual precautions we are going to require all employees take their temperatures upon arrival.
The boss got a forehead thermometer for this purpose. Currently there is just myself and he in the office, so we have tested it out.
I have found upon arrival, our temperatures were always around 96 or 97. So at first I thought, “OK it’s not working.”
Then I tried taking it after about an hour and if I do this, it goes right to 98.6 (or a tenth of a degree above or below)
So it appears to be working if we wait an hour or so.
Is this the case others have experienced? Or is it just a bad thermometer?
I’m all for precautions but if we have to wait an hour, that sort of defeats the purpose.
Is this the kind you can swipe across the forehead, or do you have to hold it in one spot? The ones you hold in place take time to read, they should beep or flash a light when ready, and they can vary several degrees depending on where on your forehead you hold them. With either type your skin temperature isn’t all that accurate of a measure, nor is 98.6F a magic number. Not sure how you can test the thermometer, but it’s not really important to see if your temperature is 98.6, or 97.5, or 99.2, you need that thing to read right when it’s 100.4F and above.
Were you coming in from the cold?
I imagine the temperature on exposed skin will not be very accurate if it has been experiencing temperatures of less than 70 degrees, especially with wind.
If you check your skin temperature later after you are indoors (with little wind) it will be higher.
Just a guess.
And as TriPolar said, getting readings from your forhead was never very accurate. The only reason people want to use it is due to lack of touching.
Are you talking about the handheld battery operated IR thermometers? We got a bunch of those for our facility and at $200 a pop are not highly calibrated pieces of equipment. Our results were much like yours and after quite a few runs figured out that certain conditions needed to be met for better readings.
You couldn’t use them in sunlight or a breeze. They seemed to be strictly an indoor type thing. Someone coming in from outside with either sun warmed skin or air cooled skin were going to have off results. They needed about 5 minutes to adjust to room temperature.
We’ve now switched over to a $15K camera system that shows a persons skin temp on a monitor. Better accuracy and faster. We process about 900 employees per day.
If you have a low number of employees I’d suggest buying each one of them their own digital oral thermometer. They can take their own temps in the presence of a manager and show them the lcd display with a more accurate temp.