Designing a house with minimal air leaks can make your home energy efficient. This may require using passive cooling techniques where natural lighting and sun orientation are maximized to enhance airflow inside the building. This includes minimizing building leaks from the roof, walls, and floors while properly ventilating every corner of the house.
Buildings Leak Air- How and Where and How to Make Your House Airtight?
Air leakage in any building occurs when outside air enters and results in uncontrolled indoor temperature through cracks and openings. Cracks and gaps may come from a damaged roof, impaired underlayment, cracked windows, defective door jams, and broken ceilings. If air leakage is not prevented, it can significantly affect the energy efficiency of your house.
Extreme weather directly affects air quality, especially during winter or windy seasons. In some instances, strong wind blow-offs may even damage your roof and gutter systems, causing moisture problems anywhere in the house. Moisture problems significantly contribute to the early deterioration of building materials and the overall health of the occupants about respiratory concerns. To keep your property airtight, home designers recommend practicing air leakage reduction and uncontrolled ventilation.
Reducing uncontrolled passage of outside air is an effective way to cut down heating and cooling expenses and improve the durability of installed building components. Caulking and weatherstripping are used as air-sealing techniques to seal off random openings that often affect the ventilation of your house. The caulking technique is used to seal cracks and small gaps seen in stationary home components such as door frames and fixed windows. Weatherstripping, on the other hand, is utilized on moving components, including operable skylights and windows.
A building has a performance gap when it doesn’t deliver the function it’s supposed to perform. And inadequate air sightedness is a key issue in home construction that should be given attention.
What about Ventilation?
Outside air isn’t the only source of air leakage, which can influence the indoor temperature of any building. The wind can create positive and negative pressure zones that drive the wind in and out of the structure. Uncontrolled heat also plays a massive role in creating wind pressure inside the house, resulting in many moisture problems. Air leakage may occur between interior spaces and installed building materials, for instance, structural walls and baseboards or curtains.
Many of the building components are naturally airtight, while others require additional layers of material to make the building leak-free. There may be air leaks in service lines such as plumbing pipes, roof gutters, and drainage systems which often go unnoticed. Of course, ventilation bricks, window slats, and open chimneys contribute to free air passages going in and out of the house.
How to Optimize Airtight Property
How to make your house airtight is never going to be easy but establishing boundaries where you can anticipate possible air movements significantly helps on how to make your house airtight. As a guiding principle, you need to develop an air barrier line on specific walls, floors, and roof structures.
If you compare it with building insulation, a designer should determine the house’s thermal envelope or critical areas where air leakage might occur. You can indicate the barrier lines in blow-up details or floor plans. These reference lines will be drawn on critical structural members of a home, including roof frames, stationary components, roof vents, plumbing installations, and other potential sources of air leaks.
You can install various air sealing materials which can help make your house airtight. If you want to seal the gap between rigid insulation boards and wood rafters, you can install foil and foam tape. This is useful for wood flooring systems on the upper levels of a building.
You can also use a purging coat or a premix mortar used as an air barrier in masonry works such as brick and concrete wall construction. If you want a natural airtight material, you can try oriented strand boards. It doesn’t need an additional layer, so you need to seal the joints.
Concrete is also an effective material for creating air barriers, particularly on solid walls and floors. This is often combined with a purging coat or a cement-based thin mortar to increase its airtightness. Suppose you have a lot of decorative elements or ornamental details in your house. In that case, you can use plaster or drywall because they are excellent alternative materials as air barriers, aside from its outstanding soundproofing properties. Glass is also an excellent airtight material which is usually sealed at the termination walls and floors, but this should be properly caulked to prevent air leakage.
Planning and Execution
To achieve the level of airtightness you’re looking for, you should establish a well-planned installation of air barriers around your building. Whenever possible, work sequences should be fully coordinated with your contractor in installing airtight materials before the finishing layers are applied. Your contractor is expected to cooperate with everyone involved in your project, including project architects, subcontractors, and site supervisors, to minimize failed execution. You should know if the air barrier techniques you have installed right from the start are working fine before proceeding to post-construction testing.
Once the base materials have been installed, conduct airtight testing. You can do this using high-powered fans installed in vital locations to increase the air pressure. Airtight testing can only be considered successful when there is no rectification needed in critical areas such as roof structure, drainage system, door openings, and flooring systems. And if you discover any installation defects, rectify the problem before installing the final covering material.
Paddy Kelly Plastering only deploys trusted professionals possessing sufficient training and technical skills to conduct airtight testing and install high-quality airtight materials. We have vast experience in constructing air leak-free homes that will help keep your indoor environment under control. You may call 087-166-7959 to help you get started with your dream energy-efficient home.
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