Home-insulation firm touring neighborhoods for thermal imaging

You may, perhaps, spot a garishly decorated Ford Escape cruising down your block in the coming months with a camera mounted on its roof.

Yes, that SUV is snapping an image of your house.

Mark Group, a home-weatherization firm, is launching a mobile thermal-imaging effort Thursday to identify buildings in the region that leak the most energy. The company calls its high-tech vehicle the HeatSeeker.

One might think this is a gimmick to generate business for Mark Group, a British home-insulation giant that last year established its American beachhead at Philadelphia's Navy Yard.

One would be correct.

But officials also see it as a means to draw public attention to the great environmental benefits derived from energy conservation. Mayor Nutter, who is promoting Philadelphia as a green city, will be on hand Thursday to put his imprimatur on the project.

Jeff Bartos, president and chief executive of Mark Group Inc., the company's U.S. affiliate, said the colorful thermal images bring the abstract concept of heat loss into focus.

"When I talk to customers about the technology and about their homes, it demystifies or simplifies home energy efficiency," Bartos said.

Mark Group has operated similar vehicles in Britain for three years and identified one million leaky houses out of 2.2 million scanned. About 42,000 homeowners signed up for upgrades, said Bill Rumble, the company's group commercial director.

"It's a proven technology," said Rumble, who dreamed up the mobile device as a way to "introduce scale" to a process that would usually be done one house at a time.

Mark Group's program raised some initial privacy objections in Britain similar to European fears expressed about Google's Street View, the popular online database of streetscapes. In response, Google obscured details that might identify too much personal information.

Mark Group says its thermal images, which are blurry depictions of a building's heat signature rendered in bright Warholesque colors, don't clearly identify a specific dwelling.

Besides, said Bartos, the company won't share the images or post them online, so homeowners need not fear that the energy police will come knocking on the door.

"This really isn't intrusive," he said. "You can go to Google Earth and see a lot more than these images will show."

Some imaginative Brits have expressed dirtier fears, according to a recent article in the Cambridge News that ran under the headline: "Will thermal images catch love cheats?"