green home: ENERGY STAR TESTING RESULTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well today was the day! The HERS Rater came and did the Blower Door Test and the Duct Leakage tests on the house today. First, let's talk about progress on the garage . . .

Below you can see that we've been working hard on the garage since the drywallers finished. We've installed new cabinets (actually used: salvaged from Building Value - see link at right for their website). We'll be painting these cabinets for a more professional look, but for now at least we have some storage. We've also got some misc. storage shelves on the other wall - you can see they need some adjustment to be more efficient, but it's a start. The cabinets that Kenny is sitting on are also salvaged, and the tops open up like a toybox. They are really narrow too, so they are perfect for the side of the garage for outdoor toy storage for the kids.

Below is Holly doing the Blower Door Test. She's from a company called Homes + here in Cincinnati. She's been doing a lot of commercial LEED work lately, she said.

So, we hooked up the contraption below to the door and made sure all other doors and vents were closed. She turned on the fan using the smallest ring (there's three different rings and the smaller ones are used for smaller houses). She said that even though our house was bigger and probably needed the bigger ring, she'd start with the smaller one just to see if we could get a reading considering how tight we think we'd built the house. I don't know much about these tests, but she said we had to reach a 50 in the readout window on the left and then when that one reached 50, we would record the number in the readout window on the right. As it turns out, our house - even though it is big - was able to make the reading using the smallest ring. The reading that we recorded was 320. She said that was the lowest she'd ever seen and that even though it was unofficial, it was a pretty safe assumption that we would receive the highest available rating of 5+ Stars!!!

In addition, Holly tested the ductwork for leakage percentage. We did this by covering all of the supply and return registers with wide tape. Then we ran the blower door fan again to get another reading and do another calculation. She said that a typical "production-type" house usually has around 24-25% leakage in the ductwork. An Energy Star Certified home must reach 17% or lower. Our ductwork had less than a 10% leakage rating - which is really low. We really don't know what the actual reading is because when taping off all of the registers we FORGOT to cover all of the upstairs returns in the bedrooms and halls (because we were concentrating on the floor registers and forgot that the upstairs returns are in the walls). So even with the upstairs returns uncovered, we still only had 10% leakage!!!

Now we wait for our certificate and stickers to come from Columbus! Of course I'll post photos when it gets here!