You can insulate a leaky house perfectly and still be cold.
Air comes in where you decide, not wherever the wind finds a gap.
Insulation slows heat moving through the building fabric. It does nothing about heat leaving with air that escapes through gaps, cracks and unsealed junctions — and in a typical older Irish home, that uncontrolled leakage is a substantial part of the heat loss.
This is the misunderstanding that puts people off, so it’s worth being clear: an airtight building is not a sealed box. It’s a building where air comes in and goes out where you decide, through a ventilation system designed for the purpose, rather than randomly through gaps you can’t control, carrying heat with it.
Controlled ventilation gives you better air quality than leakage ever did, because it works consistently instead of depending on which way the wind is blowing. Airtightness and ventilation are designed together, always.
Rarely one big hole. Usually dozens of small, predictable paths.
Air leakage is rarely one big hole. It’s dozens of small paths, and the usual offenders are consistent:
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A blower door test puts the building under controlled pressure and measures the air changing per hour. It gives you a number to work against, and it’s how compliance is demonstrated on new builds and deep retrofits.
More useful than the number, in a retrofit, is what the test reveals. With the building under pressure we can walk it and find the leaks — with smoke, with thermal imaging, and by hand. That turns airtightness from an abstraction into a specific list of things to seal. We carry out testing at two stages on larger projects: an early test while the fabric is still accessible and problems are cheap to fix, and a final test for certification.
Once leakage paths are identified, sealing uses the right material for each junction — membranes, tapes, grommets, expanding seals and airtight-grade sealants, applied to surfaces prepared to take them. Ordinary decorator’s filler and expanding foam do not make a building airtight. They’re what you find when a previous job failed.
Not if ventilation is designed alongside it. It’s when buildings are tightened without ventilation being addressed that problems appear. We assess both together.
It depends on the building and what it’s being certified against. New build and NZEB targets are considerably more demanding than what a typical retrofit achieves. We’ll set a realistic target for your project at survey.
Yes. The test works on any completed building — though sealing what it finds is easier when finishes are still open.
It’s generally delivered as part of a wider upgrade rather than as a standalone grant measure. Ask us and we’ll tell you how it sits in your project.
Call 051 850722 to discuss your project. We test, find the leaks, and seal them properly.
