Open Door Assessment
Liese Hittson
Professional energy assessors use blower door tests to help determine a home's airtightness. Our blower door instructional video illustrates how a blower door test is performed, and how your contractor utilizes the diagnostic information provided to identify areas of air leakage in your home, and make energy-saving improvements.
A blower door is a powerful fan that a trained energy professional temporarily mounts into the frame of an exterior doorway in your home. After calibrating the device, the fan pulls air out of the house, lowering the air pressure inside. The higher outside air pressure then flows in through all unsealed gaps, cracks and openings such as gaps, cracks, or wiring penetrations. If conditions do not allow for lowering the pressure in the home, the fan may also be operated in reverse, with air pressure increased inside the home.
While the blower test is being conducted, the analyst may use an infrared camera to look at the walls, ceilings, and floors, to find specific locations where insulation is missing and air is leaking. The analyst may also use a nontoxic smoke pencil to detect air leaks in your home. These tests determine the air infiltration rate of your home, which is recorded on a laptop or tablet.
The blower door test is conducted as part of the energy assessment of your home. Your contractor may also operate the blower door while performing air sealing (a method known as blower door assisted air sealing), and after to measure and verify the level of air leakage reduction achieved.
Blower doors consist of a frame and flexible panel that fit in a doorway, a variable-speed fan, a digital pressure gauge to measure the pressure differences inside and outside the home, which are connected to a device for measuring airflow, known as a manometer.
There are two types of blower doors: calibrated and uncalibrated. It is important that auditors use a calibrated door. This type of blower door has several gauges that measure the amount of air flowing out of the house through the fan.
The calibrated blower door's data allow your contractor to quantify the amount of air leakage prior to installation of air-sealing improvements, and the reduction in leakage achieved after air-sealing is completed.
Your home energy professional will perform the blower door test, including a walk-through of your home, setting up the blower door, and conducting the test. The following steps will help prepare your home for a blower door test:
TL;DR: would I recommend it and would I do it again? I would recommend it for someone who was in a similar situation and yes, I would do it again if I were in these same circumstances. However, if you want to go the iBuyer route, you better be a detail-oriented person who can keep track of a lot of different things and you need to be willing to follow up with people, possibly multiple times.
Our original plan was to sell with our realtor, as we did with our last home. Out of pure curiosity, my husband looked into Zillow Offers months before we were actually going to sell our home. At the same time, I was preparing to sell our home the traditional way with staging and upgrades. So I was in the process of painting all the kitchen cabinets white and packing up some of our things to make the home look less cluttered for staging. I also did quite a bit of work on the yard and we hired someone to replace the ugly linoleum floors in our bathroom with tiles. All of this was occurring from about October 2020-January 2021 (with quite a long break for Christmas).
The following day was our Zillow Offers assessment and we were fairly confident that we were going to choose Zillow over going the traditional route. That morning, as we were getting ready for the day, I told my husband that it was probably a good idea if we look into a couple of other iBuyers, just to see. Almost as if shopping around for a good quote. So that very morning we set about getting offers from Opendoor as well as from Redfin Now. Every single iBuyer, including Zillow Offers, were exceptionally quick on their turnaround.
Now the race to find a new home was on and that opened a whole new can of worms. Thankfully, we had our amazing realtor team to guide us. They helped us buy our first home and then the next and we were so happy that they could help us do that again. I highly recommend them: The Guderyon Team.
So, now looking back on it and knowing the state of the current market, we probably could have gotten close to what Opendoor gave us for our home if we had gone the traditional route. But I would have definitely had to finish the cabinets and do showings and staging and deep cleaning, so Opendoor was still the best route for us. One small note: many of the homes we looked at did not include fridge/washer/dryer for some reason. We contacted Opendoor about that and we were not able to keep our appliances so if you want to keep your appliances, that would be something to bring up with your Experience Partner before you sign the contract.
This was very insightful and we will be going through this same process with OpenDoor soon. The repair cost that you mentioned is that 6k they charged you for repairs after they took over your home or was that from the assessment?
Thank you for sharing your experience. I came across your blog as I was researching what happens during assessment. You wrote that they only came to see the exterior and left a lockbox. When I did my video, I explained some of the things we did to our home since we purchased it(new flooring, pergola and epoxy garage flooring) so I am hoping they take this into account and possibly raise the initial offer a little more. I am wondering why they only viewed the exterior and not the interior during your experience? Thank you for any feedback.
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Mya Poe is Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University. Her scholarship has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Writing Assessment, and Across the Disciplines. Her co-authored and co-edited books have won the CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award (2012) and the CCCC Outstanding Book of the Year (2014). She has also guest-edited special issues of Research in the Teaching of English (2014) and College English (2016) and is co-editor of the Oxford Brief Guides to Writing in the Disciplines. She is co-author, most recently, of, "Civil Rights and Writing Assessment: Using the Disparate Impact Approach as a Fairness Methodology to Determine Social Impact," published in the Journal of Writing Assessment. Currently, she is working on a monograph entitled Intended Consequences: Making Writing Assessment Fairer.
Asao B. Inoue is Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Director of University Writing and the Writing Center, a member of the Executive Board of Council of Writing Program Administrators, and the 2018 Program Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Among his articles and chapters on writing assessment and race, his article, "Theorizing Failure in U.S. Writing Assessments" in Research in the Teaching of English, won the 2014 CWPA Outstanding Scholarship Award. His co-edited collection, Race and Writing Assessment (2012), won the 2014 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for an edited collection. More recently, his book, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Socially Just Future (WAC Clearinghouse/Parlor Press, 2015) won the 2017 CCCC Outstanding Book Award for a monograph and the 2015 CWPA Outstanding Book Award. In November 2016, he co-edited a special issue of College English on writing assessment as social justice.
Norbert Elliot is Research Professor at the University of South Florida and Professor Emeritus of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is author, most recently, of "A Theory of Ethics for Writing Assessment," published in Journal of Writing Assessment. With Diane Kelly-Riley, he is co-editor of Improving Outcomes: Disciplinary Writing, Local Assessment, and the Aim of Fairness (forthcoming, Modern Language Association of America). With Alice Horning, he is co-editor of Talking Back: Senior Scholars Deliberate the Past, Present, and Future of Writing Studies (forthcoming, Utah State University Press.) With Richard Haswell, he is co-author of Holistic Scoring of Writing: A Theory, A History, A Reflection (forthcoming, Utah State University Press). He presently serves as editor-in-chief of Journal of Writing Analytics, published by the WAC Clearinghouse.
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