The Best Way To Air Tightness Test – The New ATTMA Technical Standards

New ATTMA Technical Documents

In this 6-part series, Chris Milsom (CM), Digital Marketing and Membership Coordinator sat down with Paul Carling (PC), Technical Manager of ATTMA to discuss a range of topics to do with Air Testing.

In our penultimate part, we talk about everything that in the new ATTMA Technical Documents.

CM – Hi Paul, you’ve been busy writing the new ATTMA Technical Documents I believe. Can you tell me what the main highlights of them?

PC – Yes, I’ve been working hard to make them easier to read. There are a lot of examples that have been added. The things that are discussed there are a lot more images that have been added.

The Envelope Area section has been added and there have been some significantly more robust terms added in of the guidance, the same for temporary sealing and deviations. There are actual examples of how to deal with specific elements and what is and isn’t acceptable.

There’s been some small tweaks to some equations for better clarity. The sample data in the back has been improved. The guidance that was in a secondary document for compartmentalised buildings has been moved into TSL 2 now.

And, there’s a new test standard under TSL 3, which includes part of compartmentalised buildings. In fact, TSL3 is a standard that’s basically all the complex building stuff out for TSL2, which has been moved into a separate document when you can’t test the building in its entirety.

So, this test standard deals with high-rise buildings where you test parts of them you could. There could be individual stories, or it could be individual zones. It’s how to test phase handover buildings. It’s how to do compartmentalised buildings where you don’t test all compartments at once, but the point of this is the fundamental change is that it is no longer acceptable to just test part of a building and say that represents the entirety of the building.

If you test the building in bits, you’ve got to test all the bits.

CM – Thanks Paul, very neatly summed up.

The last in our series will be coming up next week, with the ATTMA App.

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