By Tommy Eckert
The Hanley Sustainability Institute hosted guests from Sinclair Community College's Industrial Training and Assessment Center (ITAC) as a part of the Undergraduate Sustainability Fellowship program. Micah Bidwell, ITAC Assessment Manager at Sinclair, gave a presentation and led HSI Summer Fellows on a walkthrough and full energy audit on a house in the student neighborhood. During this audit, we learned the basic skills required to test houses on how well they are constructed, how well they use energy, and how well they are ventilated. We conducted several tests on the house, including the Blower Door Test and Duct Blaster Test.
Micah taught us about how houses are constructed, the different types of insulation used in houses, and different types of building styles. This taught us a lot about how the houses in the Student Neighborhood use energy in various ways, as well as how they lose energy due to poor insulation and sealing. We also learned a lot about the ventilation and heating systems in place for most residential houses. She also talked to us about how each of the different tests we can do help to determine how well a house was built and how well it has been maintained. We then went to 220 L Street, where we conducted a real energy audit on a UD house.
Blower Door Test
The Blower Door Test is designed to show how well a house is sealed off from outside conditions. The test is conducted by closing off all of the house's exterior doors and opening all the interior doors (bedroom, bathroom, etc.) in order to make the entire house one continuous system. We set up a blower door to create a pressure differential between the inside of the house and the outside environment. The goal was to make the house 50 Pascals less pressurized than the outside air, which we accomplished by using a large fan to blow air outside.
After setting everything up, we looked around the house with infrared cameras for anything out of the ordinary. We found several outlets that showed up on the IR cameras as being hotter than the rest of the room. Upon placing a hand against them, we could feel air rushing through. This likely meant the outlets were not well sealed and could be places where the house was losing heat energy. Other places that were poorly insulated and allowed air to travel through them included large gaps between baseboards, the access door to the attic in the upstairs bathroom, and several of the house's windows.
Duct Blaster Test
We also conducted a Duct Blaster Test, which is meant to test the efficiency of a house's HVAC system. First, we went around the house and looked for any floor vents. We taped all of them off except for one so that air could not flow through them. On the large air return vent, we placed a fan and a manometer, which is a tool used to tell the difference in pressure between two points.
We turned the fan on full blast and looked at the manometer to determine the maximum amount of air that traveled through the ventilation system at one time. Results showed that the house's HVAC system was getting old and was requiring more and more energy to keep the house heated or cooled to an acceptable level. Heating and cooling are one of the largest places where residential energy efficiency can be improved, and this house was no different.
Takeaways
The tests taught us about the importance of energy efficiency in a house that is very similar to the ones many UD students live in during the school year. The Blower Door Test and Duct Blaster Test clearly demonstrated that not every house in the Student Neighborhood is perfect, indicating there is room to improve the University's residential energy use. It also taught us about owning a home in the future and gave us the tools and experience needed to optimize our own houses down the line.
During the summer, I have been doing a lot of work putting together a dashboard to see the energy efficiency of every house in the South Student Neighborhood. I am doing this to try and find any outliers among the electric data for any individual properties. While it is not always realistic to run this detailed level of tests on every house, looking at these outliers and running tests on the least-efficient houses may help reveal the causes for lower energy efficiency and give us the opportunity to improve them.
It was also a great experience talking to and working with students and staff from Sinclair. It isn't every day that we get the opportunity to work with people from other universities on a project like this, so it was really cool to meet people from Sinclair and hear their perspectives on Sustainability and Energy Efficiency. I hope that we can continue working with them in the future and I hope that their experience at UD was mutually beneficial.