Blower Door and Infiltration Testing
Wilson Services has been offering blower door services since 2004. We perform this service for a nominal fee, or often times we will include this service at no extra charge for our Massachusetts customers purchasing new heating and cooling systems from us (please ask your sales representative if you qualify for a free blower door consultation; if so it will be written in the scope of work section of the Agreement).
The service has many useful applications:
- You’re building a new home and you want proof of the new homes energy characteristics.
- You just bought a new home and have concerns that the home wasn’t built to the standards that you were promised, or expected.
- You’re about to purchase a home and want to know how the house will perform from an energy standpoint (also what improvements should happen first?).
- You’re having all your windows replaced and you want a before and after test done to confirm a quality installation (just because they’re new doesn’t mean you’ll get a top-quality installation).
- You’ve read about ERVs or HRVs and you’re not sure if you’re house really requires one.
- You want to hire someone to seal up your duct work and need a before and after test to quantity the results.
- You want to quantify the exact building pressure your heating appliances will start to operate at dangerous levels (Carbon Monoxide threats).
During a typical test (testing parameters vary depending on what were trying to achieve, see the bullets above), we will walk around the house and identify all of the areas that are contributing to the most infiltration. We encourage the home owner to be there for this. We use a smoke stick that emits a harmless visible smoke into the air that allows us to see the air movement. Although puffing the smoke seems easy enough, there are several tricks that we use to save time and maximize the effectiveness of the test.
The test will quantify several factors:
- The extrapolated cumulative hole in your home in square feet
- The total air change per hour during peak winter conditions
- The total air change per hour during peak summer conditions
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