How To Make Your Home Air Tight
You can implement several passive home strategies during your homes design and construction to help make your home air tight, such as:
Proper Sealing
Attention to detail during construction is crucial to ensure that all gaps, joints, and penetrations are sealed effectively. This includes using airtight membranes, tapes, and sealants to eliminate potential leakage points. Commonly leakage can occur around doors and windows, including internal and external doors, and skylights. Along with this vents, hatches and heating and cooling systems can also allow conditioned air to escape the home or room. Fireplaces as you can imagine can be quite inefficient due to the required ventilation for the smoke and other gasses to escape. Chimney dampers are another important area to consider air leakage around. It is critical that the installation of these features is done properly to ensure the home is sealed fully.
Quality Windows and Doors
High-performance windows and doors with excellent airtightness properties are installed to minimize air infiltration and heat loss.Of course, this is considering when your windows and doors are closed. When closed we want our windows and doors to block any airflow, opposite to how it acts when opened. we want this dynamic behaviour, where it allows plenty of airflow while open and no airflow when closed. Often the window-to-frame connection is sealed by the manufacturer which is why you want to ensure it is a quality supplier.
Ventilation System
While airtightness is vital, ensuring adequate indoor air quality is equally as important. Passive homes incorporate mechanical ventilation systems with heat recovery, which provide a controlled and efficient exchange of fresh air while recovering heat from outgoing air.
Continuous Insulation
A continuous insulation layer is applied throughout the building envelope, eliminating thermal bridging and maintaining a consistent temperature barrier. Most of these passive design features work in conjunction with each other to allow for optimal functionality and efficiency of your home.
Airtightness
Want to learn more about airtightness and what it means for your home: click here