Ducts play a crucial role in heating and cooling your home. They deliver conditioned air throughout your home. Ensuring they’re properly sealed will reduce energy costs, maintain a higher level of comfort, promote safety, enhance the quality of your indoor air, and help protect the environment by keeping energy usage down.
Ducts run throughout your home, and if they have leaks, are improperly sealed, or have poor connections, your heated or cooled air will leak out. This means your HVAC system has to work harder (increasing your utility bill), and it makes it harder to keep your home comfortably heated and cooled. In addition, you expose your home to more pollutants and increase the safety hazard of backdrafting. You can lose up to 20 percent of your air due to leaky ducts alone.
To seal your ducts, use a mastic sealant or metal tape (avoid duct tape; it does not last long). Inspect, or have inspected, the ducts throughout your home and check for leaks and faulty connections and repair them.
Consider insulating ducts that run through crawlspaces, attics, unfinished basements and garages, as these areas are usually unheated, which can also cause a loss of energy. If your heated air is leaking into areas that need to be heated in the first place, at least it’s not a total loss, though it is more difficult to control where it’s going.
Once you seal your ducts, you will find that you’re losing less air, your home is more comfortable heating/cooling-wise and you’re saving money. If anyone in your home has asthma or allergies, you’ve also reduced the amount of pollutants that can enter your home via the ducts and circulate through your house, aggravating these conditions.
Serving the San Joaquin Valley and greater Fresno areas for nearly 40 years, Donald P. Dick Air Conditioning is here for all your HVAC needs. Contact us today.
Our goal is to help educate our customers about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about duct sealing and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
Donald P Dick Air Conditioning services the greater Fresno area in California. Visit our website to see our special offers and get started today!
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