Is Your House too Leaky or Too Tight? Both are a Concern for Poor Indoor Air Quality!
Sometimes it’s easy to tell if a home is too leaky. If there are drafts around windows and doors combined with unsealed interior water heater or furnace closets, frequently a trained observer can tell. If the house smells musty or stale air that can be a sign that your home is too tight.
Standards are set by the Building Performance Industry on how many air changes per hour should occur in a home for that home to be considered energy efficient from an air infiltration standpoint (not too leaky) and still provide enough air changes per hour to make sure that it “breathes” enough air that it helps to dispel the build-up of cleaning chemicals, cooking vapors, and carbon dioxide, etc. for the home’s air to be healthy.
What’s great is you can know with a simple Blower Door Test!
What is a Blower Door?
A blower door is a powerful fan that mounts into the frame of an exterior door. The fan pulls air out of the house, lowering the air pressure inside equal to about a 25-mile-an-hour wind blowing on all sides of the house. The higher outside air pressure then flows in through all unsealed cracks and openings.
Blower doors consist of a frame and flexible panel that fit in a doorway, a variable-speed fan, a pressure gauge to measure the pressure differences inside and outside the home, and an airflow manometer and hoses for measuring airflow.
There are two types of blower doors: calibrated and non-calibrated. It is important that auditors use a calibrated door. This type of blower door has several gauges that measure the amount of air pulled out of the house by the fan. Non-calibrated blower doors can only locate leaks in homes. They provide no method for determining the overall tightness of a building. The calibrated blower door’s data allow the auditor to quantify the amount of air leakage and the effectiveness of any air-sealing job.
When our crews are performing a professional air seal, we always use a blower door to assure that we know the effectiveness of our measures and we work to make sure we do not get the house too tight.
If the blower door indicates that the house is too tight, depending on how tight it is, we may recommend they contact a heat and air company to install mechanical air or a ventilation system.
To learn more about Air infiltration and Blower Door services click here
We spend so much time in our homes — air quality in the home is important!
We proudly serve Tulsa, Jenks, Broken Arrow, Bixby, Owasso, Sand Springs, Sapulpa, and the surrounding areas.
