Hey Paul
A duct is a duct hot air or cold air.  I find that pressure pans work best when the zone that the heating or cooling ducts is outside the cond area crawl, attic etc. I guess you would not be looking for leaks if ducts were inside though huh.  Anyway I love pressure panning for problem locating but the duct blaster is the weapon of choice for showing post work results worth every penny

I run the same battery of tests at every home.  5 tests one after the other in this order: Blower door, Zone Pressures, Pressure pans, Duct blaster total leakage, Duct blaster leakage to the outside.  The whole set take me apx 45 min to do if the house is ready for me.  At the end of these tests I have a snapshot of the home and what its doing.  I may have some high pressure pans that will go along with some high duct leak numbers so I know I have leaks and I know where to start looking.  I know how connected the attic and crawl space are to the main body of the home and where to start looking for infiltration problems.  

my other use for pressure pans is when during my work I cant seem to get the duct blaster numbers where I need them and I cant find the problem by sight.  Pressure pans are a great detective tool.  I never use one without the other as they tend to compliment each other so well.  If I had to give one up it would be the pressure pans as those numbers are less conclusive for duct health indicators.

The problem I see the most is new home testers make a big fuss about the tests and the gear.  Its to much, it takes to long, its unnecessary, its too hard.  All that stuff is nonsense the tests are easy and can be done quickly if you work at it.  Its how you interpret the data you get that requires knowledge and skill.  Just like doctors interpret tests and create action plans so do we.  Old doctors pushed on you with their fingers and took educated guesses modern doctors put you in a MRI machine and know for sure.

Yes I always have the IR when possible though I only have one for 6 auditors and 5 crew trucks.  It tends to get sent to the most challenging problem homes we are working on at the time.  I wish we could have one on every truck but my boss is a little old school and hasn't bought into their use 100%.  Definitely a must have for private sector work.

frenchy wrote on 02/01/10 at 6:17pm:


The new i Series from Flir are $1995 and $2995.

In my previous profession I was asked to provide energy audits. That was in the mid 90's. A camera was  $15,000 or rmore. So now that I am actually going to get in to the business $2,000 looks cheap lol

If the choices are no camera or a low end camera than I would say a low end would be worth.  I would also say that the distance it is being used from also plays into the image quality.