Building air leakage

Unintended Infiltration in buildings is responsible for a significant portion of the global housing stock energy demand. Today, the fan pressurization method, also known as blower-door test, is the most frequently used measurement method to evaluate the airtightness of buildings and determining the total air change rate of a building or a building element. However, the localization and quantification of single leaks in the building envelope remain difficult and time-consuming. In this paper, an acoustic method is introduced to estimate the leakage size of single leaks in buildings.

Building air leakage rate is taken into account in energy calculations, but mainly with default tabulated values. With tabulated values, there is an option to use measured values instead of more conservative tabulated values. Regarding compliance, usually there is no requirement to measure and verify the building air leakage rate (except in France).