What is air tightness or air sealing?
Under the Ontario Home Energy Retrofit Program, there is a grant for making your home more air tight, or ‘sealing up your home’ to prevent heat (air) loss. This is an essential basic improvement every homeowner can make in order to keep the heat in during the winter, and out in the summer! Without proper air tightness in a home, you are heating the outside at your cost.
Your home may have poor air tightness, or a lot of air loss, due to leakage in a number of places. Typically, homeowners feel or notice heat loss around their drafty windows and doors (this isn’t always the door or window’s fault, sometimes it’s the framing around the unit). You also may notice heat escaping through your fireplace chimney, especially if it’s an old fireplace that is never used. That’s a pretty big hole to have in your house! Air leakage can also occur in old furnace vents that remain in the house and go out through a chimney, or perhaps you have an unsealed attic hatch. A lot of air can escape up and out through the cracks around the hatch. Overall, you may experience heat loss due to poor construction or renovation practices around the entire perimeter of your house.
During an energy assessment, the Certified Energy Advisor will actually measure the volume of air leakage in your home and will recommend how you can improve it. Sometimes this involves many little things (caulking, foam gaskets behind electrical plates, weather stripping) and sometimes it’s much more complicated, it depends on the house.
For more tips about improving the airt tightness of your home, visit the Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation (http://cmhc.ca/en/co/co_001.cfm). They offer many free publications under the About Your House series.
This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Air Sealing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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