Built Environment

What Is Built Environment Testing?

Built environment testing involves evaluating the physical conditions and performance of structures such as buildings, bridges, and other infrastructure.

This testing is essential to ensure these structures’ safety, efficiency, and durability, addressing aspects like airtightness, structural integrity, and energy performance.

Techniques such as airtightness testing and leak quantification play a critical role in identifying vulnerabilities that could compromise the building’s performance or safety.

Built environment testing employs advanced methods and technologies to optimise construction practices, meet regulatory standards, and improve the overall quality and sustainability of the built environment.

Meet Building Regulations With Built Environment Testing Solutions

Ensure your projects meet building regulations with our comprehensive built environment testing solutions. At Coltraco Ultrasonics, we specialise in advanced airtightness testing and leak quantification to help you achieve compliance with stringent standards.

Our cutting-edge ultrasonic technology provides precise and reliable measurements, identifying potential issues that could compromise your structures’ safety, efficiency, or energy performance.

By partnering with us, you gain access to expert insights and state-of-the-art tools that support your commitment to quality and regulatory adherence, ensuring your buildings are safe, sustainable, and up to code.

Learn More About Our Portascanner Airtight – Perfect For Integrity Testing!

Portascanner® AIRTIGHT is our most advanced ultrasonic tool for room integrity testing, ensuring unparalleled airtightness. This device precisely locates and quantifies even the most minor leaks, and it can perform data analysis to present these results as precise indicators of a room’s airtightness. This allows for quick and highly accurate testing, making it ideal for construction, maintenance, and medical applications.

Clean indoor air should be a fundamental commitment, ensuring everyone has access to pure, fresh air as a fundamental human right. Achieving this requires an airtight building as the foundation for energy-efficient mechanical ventilation and effective air filtration. Any unwanted air infiltration or leakage through gaps or cracks compromises the integrity of air filtration and purification processes and increases the energy consumption of air handling units.

The Portascanner® Airtight is a world-first from Coltraco Ultrasonics.

This is the first time anybody has been able to:

1. Identify leak sites with a microscopic level of accuracy.
2. Measure and quantify them using sophisticated algorithms.
3. Generate a value for the air flow rate through each leak.
4. Calculate the building’s/room’s overall air permeability.

How The Portascanner Can Help You! 

The Portascanner® AIRTIGHT provides a level of certainty that traditional tools such as thermal cameras, anemometers, and smoke pencils cannot match. It is uniquely preventative, ensuring a door fan test pass on the first attempt.

Thermal Cameras

Thermal cameras require a temperature difference to detect leaks, which:

• Often necessitates completing the building envelope, making early-stage testing challenging.
• Limits testing to specific times of the year due to weather conditions.
• Can result in delays from unpredictable weather, impacting project timelines.

Thermal imagery is qualitative and cannot provide absolute leakage measurements. Consequently, comparisons between different times or locations are unreliable. High-quality thermal cameras are expensive, and cheaper models lack the necessary resolution and reliability.

Anemometers

Anemometers require pressurisation involving a blower door, PULSE test, or fan apparatus, and the building envelope must be complete. This hinders early-stage leak detection unless a localised sealed fan compartment is used. However, this setup could be more practical for detecting multiple leaks.

While anemometers can measure airflow speed, determining the volumetric flow rate (needed for air permeability or air changes per hour) requires a flow hood. Volumetric flow rate anemometers need careful positioning, making them impractical for unknown leak locations. Even flow speed anemometers are less efficient than the Portascanner® due to potential false positives when moved.

Smoke Pencils

Smoke pencils also require pressurisation and a completed building envelope, limiting early-stage leak detection. Interpreting smoke patterns can be difficult, with smaller leaks easily missed and local air disturbances causing false positives. Smoke pencils cannot quantify the severity or size of leaks, lacking both quantitative and qualitative measures.

In summary, the Portascanner® AIRTIGHT offers superior accuracy and efficiency for detecting leaks compared to thermal cameras, anemometers, and smoke pencils, particularly during the early stages of construction.

As Industry Leaders, We Created The Portascanner Airtight!

The Portascanner® AIRTIGHT is unique and equipped with the hardware and software to generate the most stable and consistent signals required for ultrasonic leak quantification. In a recent test study at the Air Tightness Testing and Measurement Association (ATTMA)’s Building Performance Hub, the Portascanner® AIRTIGHT demonstrated outstanding performance. It identified and quantified air leaks that other methods missed, achieving ultrasonic quantification of leak sites in a depressurised environment, a groundbreaking achievement.

Devices like the Portascanner® AIRTIGHT, which enables frequent and regular detection, location, and quantification of unwanted air leaks, must be integrated alongside existing airtightness testing equipment to ensure the success of building ventilation strategies. Coltraco Ultrasonics offers consultancy services to support local authorities, Stroma-built environment professionals, and self-builders in incorporating these advanced tools into their projects. 

The Portascanner® AIRTIGHT Is Unique Ultrasonic Technology.

Technologies such as smoke pencils and thermal cameras are highly subjective. They cannot quantify the extent of leaks or the airflow through them, while anemometers, despite measuring airflow directly, have other flaws.

The Portascanner® AIRTIGHT surpasses these methods by determining if a surface’s permeability is low enough to allow positive or negative pressurisation with Fan Pressurisation Equipment (FPE). Leak detection and quantification are critical for airtightness testing, yet existing technologies fall short.

The key benefit of the Portascanner® AIRTIGHT over an anemometer is its ability to detect potential airflow without needing a pressure differential, making it usable before HVAC and FPE installation.

It can also function when ventilation is installed but inactive or malfunctioning. For instance, if a room should be negatively pressurised to 50Pa but only achieves 1Pa, an anemometer might miss significant leaks that become apparent under higher pressure differentials.

The Portascanner® AIRTIGHT, however, can reveal the true impact of leaks under the desired pressure conditions, providing accurate measurements without needing those conditions to be present during testing.

How Can The Portascanner AIRTIGHT Be Used? 

Speak To Coltraco About Built Environment Testing Today!

Speak to Coltraco today about built environment testing and discover our comprehensive range of solutions designed to meet the highest standards.

Our expert team offers advice and certification services to ensure your projects comply with government regulations and industry best practices.

Whether you are a contractor, self-builder, or part of a local authority, we provide tailored support to help you achieve optimal airtightness and leak detection.

With advanced technologies like the Portascanner® AIRTIGHT, we help you maintain energy efficiency and safety in your buildings. Contact us today to learn more about how our innovative testing solutions can benefit your projects.