Pulse Testing

What is a Pulse Test? It doesn’t involve a nurse and you can keep your trousers on.

A Pulse Test an alternative to the Blower Door test for measuring the air leakage rate (or airtightness) of buildings. Whereas a Blower Door test takes some set up time and pressurisation of the home, a Pulse Test is quicker and requires little preparation.

The Pulse Test uses a compressed air chamber that looks like a beer keg, or maybe 2 depending on the size of the property. Once charged up, they send a brief pulse (complete with a satisfying bang) and a control unit measures the drop off in pressure.

The test is done at 4 pascals so the result must be extrapolated to 50 pascals. This aligns the result with the Building Regulations standard. Pulse Tests are carried out by specialist air testing companies, but should be considered as a quicker solution to Blower Door testing, particularly for existing buildings undergoing retrofit or older buildings that would take a lot of preparation.

As air leakage is one of the major unknown variables for assessing the energy balance of a property, getting an air test done really helps tune up the tolerances when using energy modelling software.

We had one done on our house using a Retrofit West voucher. It took less than half an hour, and frankly most of that was us chatting about how cool the gear was!