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Photo by Kane5187
Are your ducts leaking? Would you know it if they were? And who cares, anyway! Does it make that big of a difference?
Um, yeah. It does.
Here's the deal: a huge amount of energy is lost through leaking duct work, but leaking duct work is probably the most ignored when people think about making their homes more energy efficient.
- You don't see your ducts every day, so you don't think about them.
- You figure the guy (or gal) who installed them knew what they were doing.
- The media/vendors/whoever promote other products as being the do-all be-all for making your home more energy efficient (e.g. replacement windows, compact fluorescent light bulbs).
- Who wants to mess around in the crawl space, anyway? It's icky down there.
All true! But in reality, the typical homeowner is losing 20-30% of his/her energy bill through leaky ducts. Why not burn money? Or better yet, throw it into your crawl space, because that's where your heat and air are going.
And while your heated or cooled air is leaking out...nasty stuff from your crawlspace and attic are being drawn in.
Gross.
The good news is that most ductwork doesn't need to be replaced, it just needs to be repaired and/or insulated to work properly. Which, in the scheme of things, isn't very pricey when you compare this kind of home improvement to, say, replacing all your windows.
The best way to figure out if your ducts are leaking? Hire an energy auditor to do a duct blaster test. This will show how much they're leaking and will also show exactly where repairs need to be made.
A duct blaster test blasts air through your ducts, showing the amount of leakage. The energy auditor then identifies the spots that need repair. You can either fix them yourself or you can hire a weatherization specialist to do it for you - and voila, within a year the cost of the energy audit and the fixes will probably be paid for. And there you have it. No more leaky ducts. No more energy (and money) leaking out into the air!
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