Duct Leakage Repeatability Testing

Technical Report · Wed Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1249558· OSTI ID:1249558

Walker, Iain ^[1]; Sherman, Max ^[1]

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1. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)

Duct leakage often needs to be measured to demonstrate compliance with requirements or to determine energy or Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) impacts. Testing is often done using standards such as ASTM E1554 (ASTM 2013) or California Title 24 (California Energy Commission 2013 & 2013b), but there are several choices of methods available within the accepted standards. Determining which method to use or not use requires an evaluation of those methods in the context of the particular needs. Three factors that are important considerations are the cost of the measurement, the accuracy of the measurement and the repeatability of the measurement. The purpose of this report is to evaluate the repeatability of the three most significant measurement techniques using data from the literature and recently obtained field data. We will also briefly discuss the first two factors. The main question to be answered by this study is to determine if differences in the repeatability of these tests methods is sufficient to indicate that any of these methods is so poor that it should be excluded from consideration as an allowed procedure in codes and standards.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
• OSTI ID: 1249558
• Report Number(s): LBNL--175563; ir:175563
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION