552. Duct Leakage

Hello, hello, hello and welcome to this month Live Q and A with me, Derek Cole. Thank you for joining us this month. I want to speak right quick on duct leakage because it is a major problem for 95% of the homes. 95% of the homes at Aliki ducts. What does that mean? Well, the unit outside your unit, your H vac unit, your heating and air unit is outside or in the house, depending on if you have a package or split. That system generates the air. That system generates the air. And as it comes through and goes through the system, it goes to the duct system. The duct system is actually delivering the air inside your home. It's delivering the air inside your home. And then where you change the filter, it returns that same air or there in your home to the unit. So the unit is producing air and then it's bringing back the same amount of air and cooling it or heating it, depending on the season and what mode you have to sit on. Well, 95% of homes have leaky ducts in their home because these ducts are put together with metal or duck board by humans. They're made by humans, their joints put together. So metal versus metal or anything put together is not completely sealed unless you seal it. Now you try to seal it with your hands doing duct sealing and mastic. You know, you seal, you seal the best you can. But you can't get everywhere. It's impossible for a human to get everywhere. Air flows 20 cent to 30 cent per dollar is wasted on that loss of energy at your home. So what happens is you're paying a dollar for heat or a dollar for air, and you're only getting 70 cent of that dollar because you're losing the air under the house, in the attic, wherever it may be, you're losing that air because you're having that challenge with their duct system and duct leakage. The challenge is we talk about having returns or changing out your filter or, you know, keeping the filter clean. Check changed a part of that. And the reason is because when you have a duct system that's leaking that much, it's leaking on the supply side and the return side. So the air is coming back to your unit is going to be the air in the crawl space or the air in the attic is going to be dirty, unconditioned air. But you want to be conditioned, clean air because the air is coming right through your unit and then coming right back out. So depending on how clean that area is, coming back to your unit is obviously going to depend on what happens to the coal and things growing on it or being dirty and then what's going out into your home. We want that to be clean air. So the only way to start controlling these variables is, is to have a sealed duct system on top of that. So, Derek, how did you do that? How do you have a sealed duct system? Well, the product we have is called air seal. We're doing it for years. We've done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of homes with the rate success because it is an aerosol glue is a spray and it's run by machine, it's run by a computer. It works on pressure. So when it measures your duct system, it can pressurize it and say we sit off the, the return the supply and we can pressurize that duct system so it can tell us, hey, this person has this amount of leakage or this amount of luggage. Now, you know, I've seen around near 20, 24%. It's not uncommon. Which means that for every dollar you're spending, you're only getting 80 cent of that heating or air. Not quite as bad as the national average because most of our systems are dug board and not metal duck board, which is not as healthy as metal. Healthy for your lungs is metal, but it does seal a little tighter than metal does metal. Metal obviously is no seal. Dirt board is a little bit better, but not that much better. But the trade off in indoor air quality of metal versus ductwork duct board. I would take metal over duck board in the any day of the week. But what comes along with that is it's not quite as sealed as it can be. But regardless of duct board or metal duct, you can go back with and, and install air seal as you seal the ductwork. It works on pressure. So again, we pressurized that duct system. It says, hey, we're losing this much air. We're losing say 20. We're losing 20% capacity because of leakage. So we go back with air seal and it works on that pressure. So as she finds where we're losing pressure and it seals it with that glue adhesive. Kind of has an Elmer's glue kind of school glue smell to it, but it can actually go in there and seal all these places where you're losing air, losing because of leakage, it can actually seal those areas. Now for the really bad holes or really bad situations, of course, we're going to, you know, try to mainly fix that best we can and then seal it. That way we're not wasting a whole bunch of time or a whole bunch of glue. To seal a giant hole. We're obviously going to patch that and then we're going to seal that patch to the system. So this is good as new. But some believe. Well, I mean, 95% of homes have leaky ducks. But there is a solution. It's called air seal. Again, we've been doing it for years. We've had so many, so many happy clients because they're not losing 20% anymore. And they're having cleaner, fresher air because they're not losing that duck leakage. That's an average of 30 cent per dollar. The national average is 30 cent per dollar. It's actually been lost due duck ceiling.