The new HVAC system was installed this week and on Monday they put in the new insulation in the attic and did all of the air sealing, including fixing the attic door and sealing the house fan. Today they ran a follow-up blower test to see what difference all of this made. They had missed a couple of things on the first pass, so they sealed around the ash dump door in the back fireplace and installed some weatherstripping on a door. They said the air leakage had improved by 30%. That didn’t seem like that much to me since the house was very leaky before. One thing we found was that a lot of air was leaking from the back room which has wood paneling. Apparently, air was being sucked down from the attic of the back room, down the walls, and out the joints of the paneling. The only way to seal that would be to caulk all the joints of the paneling, overlay the paneling with drywall, or replace the paneling. That would be great, but that’s more than I want to do right now. You could feel a breeze blowing from those joints, but they also had a pretty powerful fan sucking all of the air out of the house. There wasn’t a way to seal from above because that room has a low flat roof that isn’t accessible.
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