HISTORY OF BLOWER DOOR TESTING

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The blower door as we know and love it today springs from technology first used in Sweden in 1977, where it was actually a blower window. The idea migrated to the United States with Ake Blomsterberg, who came to Princeton University to do research in 1979. We started using it because we were trying to understand infiltration, says David Grimsrud, who was a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, California, at the time.

According to Grimsrud, the Princeton researchers decided to mount the fan in a door because door sizes are more uniform than windows. Ken Gadsby (who was and still is at Princeton) recalls that they based the height of the lower door panel on his inseam length! With the help of the blower door, the researchers discovered that hidden leaks accounted for a much greater proportion of air leakage in a home than the more obvious culprits, such as windows, doors, and electrical outlets--a giant leap forward in our understanding of how a house operates (and malfunctions). Researchers at LBNL began to see how useful the blower door would be in weatherization and retrofitting work.

Blower door companies started springing up to serve the new market. LBNL energy researcher Max Sherman even got into the business of manufacturing blower doors for a short time. The Department of Energy put out a solicitation to buy ten blower doors, so my father and I started a company and bid on the contract and we won, Sherman remembers. These were big, heavy, clunky blower doors, made of plywood and Formica.

We were all working out of our garages, recalls Gary Anderson, cofounder of the Energy Conservatory. In 1986, Home Energy (then Energy Auditor and Retrofitter) identified 13 blower door manufacturers, with combined revenues for sales and testing nearing $10 million per year (see A Healthy Outlook for the Blower Door Industry, EA&R May/June '86, p. 6). Home Energy estimated that blower door sales alone reached $1.2 million in 1985. The focus at that time was on making more powerful fans in more manageable sizes.

Source: Home Energy Magazine written by Abba Anderson
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