Tight Ducts: Important for Keeping Heat Inside Your Home

Tight Ducts: Important for Keeping Heat Inside Your HomeThe ductwork in your home’s heating and cooling system plays an essential role in home comfort, as well as energy efficiency and indoor air quality. This is why it’s essential for ductwork to be well-designed and maintained. If you don’t have tight ducts in your home, there are a number of consequences.

Why are Tight Ducts So Important?

You can have a well-maintained furnace, A/C or heat pump, but if the ductwork is leaking air or has design problems, all that wonderful, conditioned air isn’t going to reach its destination – the various rooms throughout your home. The ducts don’t just deliver heated or cooled air; return ducts also bring spent air back to the HVAC system to be heated or cooled again. Following are problems you’ll experience if your home doesn’t have tight ducts:

  • Energy waste. If ducts are leaking air at faulty connections, that air won’t arrive at the end of the duct run and its intended destination. Instead, the air might well leak into unconditioned areas such as a crawl space, wall void, attic or basement. This forced your HVAC equipment to work harder to replace that lost air, wasting energy and money.
  • Eroded comfort. When conditioned air escapes before arriving in your rooms, often those rooms are uncomfortably warm or chilly even when the HVAC equipment is working hard to compensate.
  • Poor indoor air quality. Leaky ducts also can allow dirty air from unconditioned areas to infiltrate into the ductwork if there’s negative air pressure between the inside and outside of the ducts. This allows contaminated air to circulate with conditioned air.

How to Get Tight Ducts

Proper design and installation of ductwork are essential, of course, though over time, ducts can disconnect or otherwise spring leaks. While you might find some duct leakage yourself, a professional inspection is the best course. Once the pro finds leaky ducts, he or she can repair them with metal screws, duct mastic and quality metal-backed tape.

For a professional ductwork inspection in your Yuma area home, please contact us at Hansberger Refrigeration and Electric Co.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Yuma, Arizona about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about ductwork and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Guide or call us at 928-723-3183.

Credit/Copyright Attribution: “Alex Kosev/Shutterstock”