Duct Sealing: Ensuring Your Home Is As Efficient As Possible
How do you know your home may be a candidate for duct sealing? Simply by knowing how old the house is. In past eras, when cutting building costs was a higher priority than energy efficiency, ductwork installed at original construction was often not designed and constructed to remain leak-free for the life of the house. In fact, any home 10 years or older can be suspected to have duct leakage that may exceed recommended standards based on a percentage of total system airflow. Insufficient or absent joint sealing, seams that leak due to poor manufacturing and rust or corrosion are all factors that conspire to create leakage over time.
Here are some of the consequences of leaky ducts:
- Lost energy efficiency – The average air leakage from existing residential ductwork in the U.S. is around 30 percent. That means nearly a third of your heating and cooling dollars may be wasted through duct leaks. Imagine driving a car with a hole in the fuel tank that leaked a third of your gasoline.
- Unhealthy air quality – Leaky ductwork not only allows the conditioned air to escape, it may also draw contaminated air into the system and disperse it through your living spaces. Leaks in the return side of ductwork may suck air in from unconditioned zones of the home, such as the attic, crawl space or inside wall voids. This air may contain mold spores, bacteria or other pollutants.
- Inconsistent heating or cooling – Ductwork with major leaks or disconnected segments won’t heat or cool all areas of the home evenly. Cold spots or hot spots result, significantly diminishing interior comfort.
- System wear and tear – Leaky ducts cause the furnace and air conditioner to run longer to meet thermostat settings. Excessive on and off cycling may reduce the expected service life of expensive components like the A/C compressor and blower and/or the furnace heat exchanger.
Sobieski Services offers professional duct pressure testing and duct sealing to restore your home’s energy efficiency.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC & plumbing systems).
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