Sanctuary Blower-Door Test Saturday Dec. 17th, 4PM

[Eric Broadbent]

I'm sending this email around to those who have been on recent Buildings & Grounds emails.

One of our local experts on building energy efficiency - David Fay, has offered to perform what's called a "blower door test" on the church, to help us find places where we're losing heat due to air infiltration.
This is a valuable service in many ways (commercial vendors charge many hundreds of dollars to test medium-sized buildings), and it is one that we'll follow up with some weatherization work in January to seal hopefully all the places that we discover during the test. Recently I participated in a weatherization day at the St. Andrews church in Ayer, and it was estimated that the work done will save them well over $600 annually on heating costs. The other benefit is that people learn how to identify air-inflitrations themselves and then learn how to seal them.

The testing is performed with equipment that creates a vacuum in the building - and then people go around the building to look for (using various means) incoming air.

That's where you come in.

We don't need a large crowd for this activity (although we will need a larger group in January to do the sealing work); if we can get 5 or 6 people who know their way around the building and who can follow some simple procedures and are thorough, we should be all set.

Ideally we'd have been able to do this in the morning, but the Sanctuary is booked until 3:30 or something like that. We really need to have the building to ourselves, since doors opening and people making noise will create difficult testing conditions - not to mention that the testing would be disturbing to other activities.

Please let me and Glen know if you can be there to help. If we can't cobble together enough people from this list, we'll start asking around.

Thanks very much.

-Eric