Weatherization and the Blower Door Test

Happy New Year and welcome to my blog!

With recent snow storms, record low temperatures and our collective need to conserve energy, more Seattle homeowners are turning to energy auditors to help define areas of improvement.  As such, I thought I’d kick off my first blog with an intro to one method of identifying energy consumption in your home.

One tool used for energy efficiency diagnostics is the ‘blower door test’.  A  no-frills name for an effective procedure that can help identify problem areas in your building envelope, and help your auditor to create a list of what to do in order of importance.  A strategy to give you the most bang for your buck.  We can all get behind that!

Your weatherization specialist installs this funky contraption in an exterior doorway (our front door has a rounded top edge, so we needed to secure it to the back door off of the kitchen).  This calibrated fan, sealed against the door with a panel system sucks air out of your home, lowering the air pressure inside, so you are able to identify air leaks.  The airflow pressure is measured in CFM’s (cubic feet per minute).  You can wet your hand and hold it up to window edges to feel the full effect of the air escaping.

The results can be surprising.  Our home is a typical 1926 Seattle tudor- with zero insulation and single paned, inefficient (but lovely) casement windows.  We knew we had issues.  Every fall we put on our down coats and then keep them on through the winter indoors.  Bad, bad, bad.  Anyway, aside from the obvious basics, we found we had a huge air leak in our bedroom.  We have a makeshift door to a side attic in our closet that was unsealed and leaking like a sieve.  That was our number one offending spot.  Just tackling that has made an enormous difference.  Because of the stack effect, all (warm) air was headed upstairs, and then escaping through our gaping air hole.  During the snowstorm, I would say our room felt balmy, compared to what it once was.  No kidding…it made that much difference!

We are tackling the other points made as we can afford them, but it felt good (literally and figuratively) to dig in and do something about it this year.  Saving money and the environment!  The Seattle area is fully stocked with educated eco-advisors who are ready and willing to identify trouble spots and  (A. do the work or (B. hand the prioritized list off to you.   David, who did our audit, was informed, great to be around, did a wonderful job and was well worth the money spent.  We are lucky to live in an area with so many eco-educated folks!