The ducts that circulate air in your home’s cooling and heating system play a crucial role in home comfort, energy efficiency and indoor air quality. Ducts can’t accomplish these important roles, however, without being well-designed and maintained. If your air ducts aren’t tightly connected, you’ll see a number of negative consequences.
Even if your home is equipped with modern, well-functioning HVAC equipment, if your ductwork is leaking air or experiencing other problem, a lot of the conditioned air isn’t going to reach the rooms in your home. Ducts do more than deliver heated or cooled air throughout your house; they also return spent air back to your forced-air HVAC system.
Following are some problems that will arise from faulty ductwork:
- Wasted energy. If air ducts are leaking air, that cooled or heated air is wasted if it’s leaking into unconditioned areas such as a crawlspace, wall void or basement. When conditioned air doesn’t reach its destination, your heating and cooling system has to work harder to compensate. This wastes energy and results in higher energy bills.
- Lost comfort. When ductwork isn’t doing its job, rooms can experience drafts and hot and cold spots. Rooms at the end of defective duct runs will become more difficult to heat and cool, resulting in lost comfort.
- Poor indoor air quality. In some cases, a duct that’s leaking air may allow dirty air to infiltrate into the duct (when air pressure outside the duct is stronger than inside). Contaminated air can backdraft into the home via the duct system, eroding the quality of inside air.
You can do a lot to avoid these problems by making sure ductwork is properly designed and installed. Yet, even the best duct systems will deteriorate over time. With most ductwork not readily visible, it’s impossible to determine whether you have duct integrity without a professional inspection. A technician equipped with high-tech diagnostic equipment and tools can inspect and assess ducts, and take action to address problems.
For a professional duct inspection in your Lorain area home, please contact us at Energy 1 Heating & Air Conditioning.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Lorain, Ohio 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 440-201-2959.
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Energy 1 Heating & Air Conditioning
1 (440) 246-5440
Serving the Lorain, OH Area