Glasgow Museums Resource Centre — Thermographic Energy Study

The Building

The Glasgow Museums Resource Centre stores the city’s museum collections — over a million objects that aren’t currently on display. A building like this has an unusual energy profile: vast storage volumes, tight environmental control requirements for the collections, and large roof areas where heat loss adds up at scale.

What We Did

Working alongside Collective Architecture as part of an energy study of the facility, we carried out a drone thermographic survey of the buildings — capturing radiometric thermal imagery of the roofs and elevations from the air.

At this scale, aerial thermography is the only practical way to see the whole picture. A handheld camera can inspect an elevation; a drone maps the entire envelope in a single session, revealing how the building performs as a system — which roof zones, junctions, and elevations are losing heat, and which are performing as intended.

The Deliverables

• Aerial radiometric thermal imagery of roofs and elevations
• Whole-envelope heat-loss picture feeding the energy study
• Evidence base for prioritising fabric improvements

Why It Matters

For estates with large-footprint buildings — museums, depots, schools, leisure centres — fabric improvement budgets go furthest when they’re aimed at measured losses. Thermography at whole-building scale is how an energy study moves from assumption to evidence.