Blower Door Testing
Blower Door Testing is essential to verify air tightness in construction.
Passive House owns and operates a modern Minneapolis Blower Door with full digital pressure set and laptop system software for recording and analysing test results.
Thomas and Peter Blower Door Testing:
The New Zealand (Australian?) context of air tightness in buildings:
Ref: Classifications of residential building airtightness (in NZ); Bassett, M.R. 2001
A CSIRO report (The Evaluation of the 5-Star Energy Efficiency Standard for Residential Buildings, December 2013), published air-tightness results for 20 houses in Melbourne; with an average result was a massive 19.7 ac/h@50pa (that's a "natural" building infiltration/leakage rate of 1 air change per hour 24/7, all year round)
Note, none of the houses tested met the NatHERS/FirstRate5 ratings premise of 5 ac/h@50pa
The European & North American context of air tightness in buildings:
From the ASHRAE Fundamentals Handbook 2013, the following published results:
