Blower Door Testing, You Need It, We Know

A blower door test is an essential tool that we energy auditors use to assess a house. If you’re working with a contractor and they won’t include one as a part of your home energy audit, you’re working with the wrong company.

WHAT IS A “BLOWER DOOR TEST”

Here’s how we would describe it. A blower door test is when we take this big calibrated fan and set it up in an exterior doorway with a computer attached to it – it will look like a large, red sleeping bag type thing covering your door. When it runs, it sucks the air out of the house until the house is depressurized to 50 pascals (a standard unit of air pressure). We are then able to compare the total air leakage of your home to industry standards.

HOW DO WE COMPARE YOUR HOME

We use something called an MVG (Minimum Ventilation Guideline). What this does is calculate a number by measuring the size of the heated – conditioned – space in your home and the number of people who live in it. After a little bit of math, we are given the MVG number. If your home scores anything above that number, you’re wasting energy.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTERWARDS

Now we know from that blower door test how much energy your home is wasting and where you’re losing it from (keep in mind that at Complete Home Solutions we also do a few other tests, including thermal imaging). The next step is for us to make some recommendations to you about what can be done to increase your energy efficiency.

Once you’ve chosen what work you want done, and we’ve gone through and done it, we’ll perform a second blower door test to show you how the improvements we’ve made are taking action. We want to make sure that you can see the results!

It’s hard for many people to imagine what it means for their house to be “energy efficient.” We are, after all, visual learners by majority. A blower door test is the “Aha” moment for many homeowners because it allows you to see how much of a problem air leaks in your house are.

Ready for your “Aha” moment? Call us at 1-410-867-1202 and get your blower door test.