Air flow through a building can have a powerful impact on comfort, expense, and air quality. Blower doors provide a way to quantify air flow and the resulting heat loss, along with a way to pinpoint specific leaks.

A blower door is a device for testing the airtightness of a building. It consists of a calibrated fan for measuring an air flow rate and a pressure sensing device to measure the pressure created by the fan flow. The combination of pressure and flow can be used to estimate the airtightness. The airtightness of a building is useful knowledge when trying to increase energy conservation or decrease indoor air pollution.

In many buildings, the most cost-effective and easiest measure toward increasing energy efficiency is sealing the building envelope. It is vitally important, therefore, to determine the extent to which your home or buiding is leaking air and locate all areas of leakage.

Many customers will say they already know where the cold air is entering their house, so a blower door test is not necessary. While this may be true, two factors must be acknowledged. First, knowing where cold air enters your house is only half the problem. Any amount of air entering the house is accompanied by air leaving the home somewhere else. Those leaks are harder to locate. By pressurizing the entire building relative to the outdoors, we can locate all the air leaks. Second, a certain amount of ventilation is needed in a house to prevent the buildup of moisture, pollutants, and earth and combustion gases, which can be deadly! A blower door test allows us to quantify the leakiness of the building and become aware of potential hazards.

Blower door testing is included for no extra charge for our customers in our energy audit package.

E-mail: jcarroll@savewithces.com