Blower door testing is a way to test the “leakiness” of your home. By depressurizing your home and measuring the rate at which air infiltrates through imperfections in the building enclosure, we’re able to assess how much energy (and money) is escaping through air leaks, and how much you’re likely to save by fixing those leaks. As part of this process, we will inspect the house with infrared to identify potentially hidden air leaks (making it much easier to address them when the time comes to get to work). We also offer blower door testing as an isolated service to test the effectiveness of improvements that have been made to a home, and to provide homeowners and contractors with a roadmap to further improve a home’s efficiency moving forward.
If you are building a new house we can help you develop a plan to test and seal air leaks before it’s too late. Depending on the style of construction this may require some minor changes or none at all. Either way doing a building air leakage test before any insulation is in place is one of the best long-term investments you can make in your new house.
Since air leakage is typically one of the greatest single methods of heat loss in a new home it makes sense to have a systematic plan to address it.
Aside from tremendous energy savings that air sealing can have for a building, there can be equally good outcomes for air quality in your house. According to recent research a majority of the fresh air we breathe in California homes is coming from attics. Where raised floors are used (crawl spaces) as much as 40% of the building air can come from the crawl space. So our question is, if you want your building to breathe, where would you like it to breathe from?
What we do know is that controlling poor quality air sources like the attic, crawl space, or garage should be among the first priority for homes where occupants suffer from respiratory issues. A blower door test along with other tools can help us pinpoint exactly where the “fresh” air in your builiding is coming from. We can then help you devise a strategy to significantly reduce the air leakage in your house.
