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Testing for Duct Leakage to

Unconditioned Spaces
To isolate the amount of malignant leakage in a duct
THE LATEST
system, you have to eliminate the duct leakage to the
FROM THE
conditioned space. It's actually easy to do this because for
ENERGY
air to leak from one place to another, two conditions must VANGUARD
be met: BLOG

1. There must be a pathway through which the air can

move.
2. There must be a pressure difference to drive the
movement.
The Best Velocity
If some of the ductwork is in conditioned space, removing for Moving Air
either of those two conditions will eliminate the leakage Through Ducts
Posted by Allison
to the inside. Getting rid of the holes (condition 1) is not Bailes on June 26,
practical - and not even possible in some cases - so the 2019

key to finding how much the ducts leak to the outside is The first thing
eliminating the pressure difference across the ducts to know about
inside the conditioned space. the velocity of
air moving
Duct leakage testing for duct leaks outside the building through ducts is
envelope that the slower
you get...
Read more

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I’m very
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the trip to
It just so happens that someone doing a duct leakage test Atlanta to
also will have a device that can pressurize the house. It's train with
called the Blower Door and is used for measuring the Energy
airtightness of a house. As you can see in the diagram Vanguard.
above (from the Energy Conservatory's Duct Blaster
Richard Pedranti,
Manual), the procedure is to run the Blower Door to Milford, PA
pressurize the house to 25 Pascals at the same time the
Duct Blaster is pressurizing the ducts to 25 Pascals. That
creates equal pressures across the ducts that are in the
conditioned space, and no air will leak to the inside.

With this setup, all the air that the Duct Blaster is
blowing into the ducts will leak outside of the conditioned
space, thus giving us a measure of the 'malignant' duct
leakage.

The number is usually given either as the straight cfm25

(cubic feet per minute at 25 Pascals) or as a ratio of the
cfm25 to the conditioned floor area served by the sytem
tested. For example, if a duct system has a result of 385
cfm25 for the leakage outside the envelope test and the
conditioned floor area served is 2500 square feet, the
ratio would be 385/2500 = 0.15 cfm25/sf.

Sometimes this number is multiplied by 100 and called

the 'percent duct leakage,' which is actually a bit
misleading. In the example above, the percent duct
leakage would be 15%. Remember that it's just a ratio,
though, and not a true measure of what fraction of air is
leaking. Because it's just a ratio, it's actually possible to
get more than 100% duct leakage.

Another way it's sometimes characterized is as a ratio of

the cfm25 to the air handler flow. If the above 385 cfm25
occurred in a duct system attached to an air handler that
can move 1200 cfm of air, this ratio would be 0.32, or
32%. Always make sure you know whether a normalized
duct leakage number is referenced to the floor area or the
air handler flow. They can be quite different.

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