The Blower Door: A Key Tool in Your Home Energy Audit

Summer is an excellent time of year to schedule a home energy audit. You can find and seal the costly air leaks in your home before you turn on the furnace. And if you act fast, you can still shave your electricity bills this summer. The blower door is a key tool in your home energy audit. Here’s a look at the blower door and the part it plays. 

This blower door fits into the frame of an exterior doorway. The bottom half contains a powerful fan that pulls the air from your home and a manometers, which measures air pressure inside and out. Homes with few air leaks tend to lose pressure quickly, and those with many leaks take much longer. The fan is strong enough to pull air through the smallest cracks in your home’s envelope.

The energy auditor first prepares your home for the test, which involves opening all the interior doors, closing and locking the windows and shutting all the exterior doors except the one that holds the blower’s frame.

The auditor verifies that gas-burning appliances are off, and your fireplace damper is closed. Once your home is ready, and the blower door is in place, he turns the fan on and keeps track of the amount of time it takes your home to reach 50 pascals, a unit of air pressure.

Once it reaches that point, the auditor will rely on thermographic tools or harmless smoke pencils to find the leaks. While some air leaks, such as places where pipes, wires and cables enter your home, are easy to find, others can be harder to locate. The thermographic tools can quickly and accurately identify temperature differences in those hard-to-find areas.

Want to take advantage of the warmer summer weather to air seal your home? Contact the experts at CR Wolfe Heating & Air Conditioning for a thorough home energy audit. We’ve provided outstanding HVAC services to homeowners in the Middletown area since 1945.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Middletown, New York about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).  For more information about blower doors and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.

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