Tag: Building Diagnostics

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Blower Door Testing for Contractors, Should You Own One?

This post first appeared on the Green Building Advisor Website.

I had the opportunity to interview Gary Nelson, one of the founders of The Energy Conservatory and Minneapolis Blower Door a few years ago.  An Interview with Gary Nelson-NorthernBuilt.  During the interview, he made the comment that his hope for the blower door when it first started appearing in the market was that every contractor would own one and that testing both existing and new homes would become a common practice.  That was 40 years ago.

We haven’t got there yet, but there are more and more contractors purchasing the tool and there are many online videos and webinars showing how a blower door is set up and used.  In this blog, I’ll discuss how to perform basic diagnostics on a home using a blower door.  Methods used to find air leaks, a short discussion on zonal pressure testing, and different tasks that the manometer can perform, all topics I think a contractor that owns (or wants to own) a blower door should be familiar with.

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Types of Home Energy Audits

This blog originally appeared on the Rockwool R-Class Program website. ROCKWOOL – R-Class Builder Program – United States (English)

Energy audit, energy assessment and building diagnostics, what are the differences?

Part of my work is in a niche discipline in the residential construction industry where I test and inspect both new and existing homes for construction errors and other deficiencies that cause a home not to meet its owners’ expectations.  A home can have a comfort or cost to operate issue.  There may be moisture or indoor air quality issues that cause health problems for the occupants, or maybe there are structural durability concerns due to water infiltration.  Sometimes this testing and inspecting simply becomes an education session to teach the homeowners how their homes work.

 

There are three different types of analysis I perform, an energy assessment, energy audit and building diagnostic.  They are all related, but a little different.  The first two deal with the movement of energy in a structure, the last is usually more about the movement of moisture, but not always.  Let’s dig a little deeper into each.

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Indoor Air Quality and Building Diagnostics

The post originally appeared on the Green Building Advisor website.

I recently purchased the CPS IAQ PRO SmartAir professional indoor air quality meter to use during energy audits and building diagnostics/investigations.  My intent with the purchase was two-fold, first to learn more about indoor air quality metrics by testing homes in my market, and second, to have a more accurate temperature/humidity/dew point estimation inside these homes.  I recently had the opportunity to use the tool on a building investigation, I’ll outline this case study later in this post.  First let’s talk about the features of the CPS IAQ PRO SmartAir.

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Diagnostic Tools-Indoor Air Quality

There are currently a few hot topics around the construction industry, the high efficiency heating and cooling system called a heat pump is one of the biggest.  Cross laminated timbers (CLT) are an engineered wood product that is getting a lot of attention in the commercial side of construction.  I’m hearing some noise about a few builders wanting to try the technology in the residential market as well.  And then there’s indoor air quality.  Since the start of the pandemic, there has been a lot of attention on how to make the air in our homes more healthy.

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