In this video Derek Cole explains that roughly 95% of homes suffer from leaky HVAC ductwork, which wastes 20‑30% of heating and cooling energy and degrades indoor air quality. He describes how ducts—whether metal or ductboard—are assembled by humans and inevitably have gaps unless sealed. The leakage forces conditioned air to escape into crawl spaces or attics, returning dirty, unconditioned air to the HVAC unit, which can foul coils and reduce system efficiency. Cole introduces AeroSeal, an aerosol‑based sealing system that uses computer‑controlled pressure testing to locate leaks, then sprays a glue‑like adhesive to seal them. For large holes, manual patching is performed before aerosol application. He contrasts metal versus ductboard ducts, noting metal is healthier for lungs but both leak; ductboard seals slightly better but still loses about 20‑24% of airflow. The sealed system restores up to 80‑90% of the energy input, improves air cleanliness, and eliminates the typical 30‑cent‑per‑dollar loss seen nationally. Cole cites hundreds of successful installations and satisfied customers as evidence of the solution’s effectiveness.
Chapters
95% of the homes have leaky ducts. What does that mean? Well, the unit outside— your unit, your HVAC 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 a 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 at, it returns that same air, or the air in your home, to the unit. So the unit is producing air and 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 duct board by humans. Uh, they're made by humans, they're 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 the best you can, but you can't get everywhere. It's impossible for a human to get everywhere air flows. 20 cents to 30 cents 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, you know, 70 cents 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, checked, 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, uh, 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 air is coming back to your unit is obviously going to depend on what happens to the coil 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 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, uh, the product we have is called AeroSeal. We've been doing it for years. We've done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of homes with great success because it is an aerosol glue. It's a spray and it's run by machine. It's run by computer. It works on pressure. So when it measures your duct system, it can pressurize it and say— we seal 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 leakage. 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 cents of that heating or air. Not quite as bad as the national average because most of our systems are ductboard and not metal. Ductboard, which is not as healthy as metal, healthy for your lungs as metal. But it does seal a little tighter than metal does. Metal on metal obviously is no seal. Duct board is a little bit better, but not that much better. But the trade-off in indoor air quality of metal versus duct board, I would take metal over duct board 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 the board or metal duct, uh, you can go back with and install air seal as you seal the ductwork. It works on pressure. So again, we pressurize that duct system and says, hey, we're losing this much air, we're losing, let's say, 20%, we're losing 20% capacity because of leakage. So we go back with AeroSeal and it works on that pressure. So it actually 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 gonna, you know, try to manually 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 trying to seal a giant hole. We're obviously going to patch that and then we're going to seal that patch to this system. So It's as good as new, but it's unbelievable. I mean, 95% of homes have leaky ducts, but there is a solution. It's called AeroSeal. We, 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 duct leakage. That's an average of, you know, 30 cents per dollar. The national average is 30 cents per dollar is actually being lost to duct sealing.
