4 Smart Reasons to Test Your Home for Leakage

11/27/2019

Making smart decisions about your home’s heating and cooling systems can have a big effect on your utility bills – and your comfort. According to MidAmerican Energy, approximately half of the energy used in your home goes to heating and cooling.

If it’s hard to maintain an even temperature in your home and your monthly energy bills are going through the roof (literally!), more times than not, your insulation is the culprit. Inadequate or poor insulation can cause several problems. From mold growth to pest invasions, having fiberglass, cellulose or no insulation at all can lead to any number of issues.

4 Smart Reasons to Get Your Home Insulation Checked

Improve the comfort of your home. Properly insulating and air sealing your home not only reduces heating and cooling costs but also improves comfort. To maintain comfort, the heat loss in the winter must be replaced by your heating system and the heat gained in the summer must be removed by your cooling system. Properly sealing and insulating your home will decrease this heat flow by providing an effective resistance to the flow of heat.
Greater energy efficiency and lower your energy bills. The value of energy efficiency is obvious: it saves homeowners money on energy bills and reduces power plant CO2 emissions to lower our carbon footprint. The EPA estimates that homeowners can save an average of 15% on heating and cooling costs by air sealing their homes and adding insulation in attics, floors over crawl spaces, and accessible basement rim joints.
Sealing and insulating can promote a healthier home. Allergies are a bigger problem than ever before. In fact, childhood asthma rates have increased by 600% over the last 30 years. Homeowners are becoming more aware that the quality of air in their homes can contribute to their health and wellness good or bad. While no insulation product alone can ensure a healthy home, insulation and air sealing are critical components of a whole building strategy for delivering healthier homes.
Insulating homes for sound. No one wants a noisy home and part of delivering a better home is ensuring it’s built with sound insulation in mind. Noise can come from outside (sirens, traffic, neighbors) or within (children, TVs, music, etc.), and evolving home preferences are making sound control more of an issue. Trending preferences for open concept houses with fewer walls or noisier urban locations are making homes built to minimize sound more popular than ever before.

Noise is complex and very situation-specific, so simply adding more insulation alone is not an effective noise control strategy. However, additional insulation will almost always need to be a core component of a smart noise control strategy.

How We Do It

At Service Legends, we have a dedicated team that is trained to find air leaks in your home. However, we also use some specialized equipment to get a complete picture of how your home is losing energy.

We use a blower door test to identify key problem areas in your home that shows us air changes per hour. This process allows us to find all the small air leaks that are causing you to lose energy and waste money, thereby enabling us to create a custom solution that meets your specific situation.

How does the blower door test work?

To conduct a blower door test, a blower door fan is placed in your main entry doorway to depressurize the house or suck out air from the interior. This process will cause outside air to be drawn through leakage points in your home. As the fan is running, our technicians use specialized equipment in each room of your home to detect and diagnose air leaks.

Sometimes you will literally see or hear where the air is coming into your home. We also use an infrared thermal camera to pinpoint the differences in temperature. Surface temperatures show up in contrasting colors, indicating a possible air leakage point.

In addition to helping us detect and diagnose air leaks all over your house, the blower door test allows your home’s air leakage rate to be calculated. All of this information allows us to recommend customized good, better, best options for your home whether it’s spray foam insulation, fiberglass batts, and so much more.

Take the First Step Today Towards an Efficient, Comfortable Home

Save money and energy by adding comfort back into your home! The longer you deal with air leakage in your home, the more money you’ll waste and the less comfortable your home will be. Service Legends Heating & Cooling can help you eliminate this problem in your home, save you money, and provide better comfort. Give us a call today to schedule a blower door test for your home.

515-657-6634 Request Appointment Online

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