We offer blower door and thermography energy audits for homes and businesses.

A blower door audit can identify any areas of your structure that may be letting in outside air and letting your heated or air conditioned air escape. Here you can find out a bit more about it.

 

Alternatives to blower door tests

You can perform very simple tests to detect air leaks around your doors, windows and its frames, but since some air leaks are difficult to identify and to measure, the Blower Door Test is a common piece of any professional audit.

A Special Fan – The Blower Door Test

The Blower Test Door is a relatively simple and easy to implement test, usually performed in less than an  hour. It uses a large and special variable-speed fan mounted on a panel that is temporarily fitted into an exterior door opening (doorway).

When the blower door test fan is turned on, the pressure inside your home is gradually reduced, causing the outside air to flow intensely into the house – through eventual cracks and unsealed openings – making it easy to measure and identify those air leaks – a task accomplished by several pressure gauges intertwined with the test fan (they measure both the rate of airflow and the home’s resistance to air infiltration).

Preparing your home for a Blower Door Test

Blower door tests demand some basic preliminary steps. You will have to close the windows and open the interior doors, and turn down heaters and thermostats, shut fireplace doors, dampers, and wood stoves and similar air intakes.

Blower door tests and thermographic inspections

Blower test doors are commonly used with thermographic inspections. The blower door promotes air leaking through gaps and air leaks in the house structures, which will appear as visible black streaks in the viewfinder of the infrared cameras (used to test the insulation).

Thermographic Test (Infrared Inspection)

Thermographic tests are used in professional home energy audits. They generate a set of images of the home’s walls and structures, to determine insulation gaps and insufficiencies.

Thermograph

Energy auditors use infrared inspections (thermography) to detect and assess home’s heat losses and air leaks associated with insulation (or lack of it, to be more precise). The main use of thermographic scans is typically to check the effectiveness of the installed insulation, or, in other words, to determine the insulation levels, and the walls or parts of the house where it should be added.

Home audits, existing buildings and new homes

Thermographic inspections are often used in existing buildings, during professional energy audits. But you may also demand a thermographic inspection when buying a new home, since new houses aren’t immune to gaps and insufficiencies in their insulation.

Interior thermographic inspections

Most thermographic inspections are interior ones, that is, they fall upon interior walls and interior parts of the house. These inspections are more accurate, than exterior
ones.

Infrared Thermographic Camera

A Infrared Thermography camera uses infrared video to make images showing the situation of the walls, roof (to detect roof leaks) and electric systems and their connections.

To learn more or request service, give us a call at (502) 396-5828.