One of the best ways to assess building envelope integrity is a blower door test, which is complicated but basically gives us insight into where air is flowing out of our buildings in ways that it is not supposed to. Just like my mother, we cannot always control when the door is opened, but we can control other losses of energy related to the conditioned air escaping. When the door is opened and closed that conditioned (heated air or cold air) is released and the HVAC system has to make more. So, think of your building as a giant box of conditioned air. Many of us have trouble correlating a great building envelope and energy efficiency. Which brings us to our topic for today: Building Envelopes. Turning the lights off when I left the room made total sense and I understood that wastage, but the concept of conditioned air and energy consumption/cost took me a little longer. “You need to decide what you want before you open the door”, she would scold us (looking back, she was right, but it was such a disappointment at the time.) You see, I didn’t realize then the correlation between letting the cold air out of the refrigerator and the size of our energy bill. My mother would get agitated at my brother and me if we stood there too long. I thought that the refrigerator was the most exquisite device in our home because it didn’t matter that the house was hot (no AC), when I opened the refrigerator door, cool air was plentiful. When I was young and growing up, I lived in a 1913 farmhouse in rural Fresno, California.
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