Walk into a new home and you notice the obvious things first. The light fixtures. How tall the ceilings feel. The tile in the kitchen. That’s how homes are sold.
How a home lives is something you discover later. Is the air fresh? Is the bedroom cold in February? Is there a draft along the living room floor? When the smoke rolls in from a fire near Sisters in August, can you easily breathe inside?
How a home lives matters as much as how a home looks. And the thing that determines how a home lives isn’t on any spec sheet.
It’s behind the walls.
Your house is leaking right now.
Most homes have thousands of small gaps in the building envelope: the layers of the walls, ceilings and floors that separate inside from outside. Tiny openings around electrical boxes, plumbing penetrations, top plates, rim joists. Each one is small. Together, they’re the equivalent of leaving a window open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, no matter what’s happening outside.
That’s not an exaggeration. It’s what blower door testing results across our service area show, year after year.
When wildfire smoke fills the Central Oregon skies, that air leakage pulls smoke inside. When pollen counts spike, it pulls in pollen. When it’s 19 degrees in January or 99 degrees in July, your HVAC system is fighting outdoor air the entire time. Air leakage accounts for 25 to 40 percent of the energy used to heat and cool a typical home.
The leak is also a moisture problem. Indoor air carries water vapor. When that warm indoor air pushes through wall and roof assemblies and hits a cold surface, it will condense. Condensation inside a wall is how mold starts and how framing rots, damage you don’t find until it’s expensive.
At Northwest AeroBarrier, we’ve been working with builders, contractors and homeowners across Oregon and Southwest Washington since 2018 as specialists in building envelope air sealing. What we’ve learned over the years, confirmed by building science at every turn, is that a home’s ability to protect its occupants starts with one fundamental principle: the tighter the envelope, the more control you have over everything that happens inside.
There’s a number that tells you how leaky a home is.
It’s called ACH: air changes per hour. It measures how often the entire volume of air in a home is replaced through air leaks. A measurement of 5 ACH means the air is changing more than five times an hour. A measurement of 1 ACH means you have control: outdoor air comes in when you want it, through a filter, on your terms.
Lower ACH is better. The number is measurable and verifiable. A blower door test at the end of construction tells you exactly how controlled your home envelope is.
Oregon code is currently 3.25 ACH, but is not usually verified with a blower door test. Anything below that provides enhanced building performance over code. 1.5 is where leading builders are headed. 0.6 is passive house tight.
When you build tight and ventilate intentionally, you get to decide what air enters your home, when, and through what filtration.
For homeowners, the takeaway is to ask about air sealing when evaluating a new home — specifically, to ask for blower door test results.
For builders, specify air sealing, detail it and verify it with an independent, third-party verifier. Tight homes outperform leaky homes on every metric that matters: Comfort, durability, health and energy.
The future of home building is resilience, comfort and health.
Central Oregon is a spectacular place to live and build. The landscape, climate, opportunity and the community draw people here from across the country, and the region continues to grow. The homes we build today will be sheltering families through smoke seasons, cold snaps, heat domes, allergy seasons and everything else this high desert throws at us for decades to come.
The single best investment we can make in the health and resilience of those homes is sealing them as tightly as possible and ventilating with intention.
It’s what science supports. And it’s what Central Oregon homes deserve.
One question to ask your builder.
If you’re shopping for a new home or hiring a builder to build one, ask a single question: What’s the blower door number? If they don’t know, that tells you something. If they do, you’ve found someone treating air sealing as the foundation it is.
That number is the difference between a home that looks great and one that lives great. Both matter. Only one of them impacts comfort, durability, health and energy.
