Segment 4: Testing Air Tightness
A blower door is used to test the airtightness of a home to ensure that air sealing strategies are effective. The blower door can be seen in the video (the red membrane in the doorway). To perform the test, we close all the doors and windows and turn on the fan, which blows air into the house and creates a slight pressure differential. A sensor connected to a computer lets us know that we have created the correct pressure differential (referred to as “50 pascal”). Under these test conditions, the sensor can measure the volume of air that is leaking out of the pressurized house.
Passive House certification requires a maximum leakage of 0.6 air volumes per hour; we calculate the actual leakage with the measured leakage (in cubic feet per minute) and the interior volume of the building being tested (in cubic feet).
