You may have performed a do-it-yourself home energy evaluation in an attempt to seal air leaks that allow valuable conditioned air to escape from your home. If you have: Congrats! An airtight home creates lower heating and cooling loads, resulting in lower energy bills year-round. DIY jobs, however, generally don’t offer the same results that a professional home energy evaluation can. Namely, a pro utilizes a blower door test, which is considered the best tool to comprehensively measure a home’s leakage and locate those areas where air is leaking.
If you suspect that your home leaks air or that your DIY evaluation didn’t turn up every air leak, consider the value of the blower door test.
Before conducting the test, the technician will install the blower door device inside the door frame of an exterior door and then close all exterior doors and windows and turn on exhaust fans in the kitchen and bathrooms. This will help the blower door fan (blowing toward the outside) depressurize the house, which simply speaking, results in outside air rushing back inside. That air is much easier to detect than if the pressure was nearly equal as is often the case in a home, especially one with a lot of air leakage.
The technician will use a thermographic scan to identify where air is leaking, and as as part of the home energy evaluation, to detect where insulation is lacking. While the process is a bit more involved than that, that’s it in a nutshell. The home energy evaluation provides the homeowner with an informed plan for sealing air leaks and improving insulation, both of which will result in lower energy bills this winter and for years into the future.
Is it time to take your home’s heating and cooling loads “down” a notch? Contact Donald P. Dick Air Conditioning for more information about a home energy evaluation, or to ask a question about the blower door test. We serve homeowners throughout the San Joaquin Valley.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in the greater Fresno, California area about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about home energy evaluations and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
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