Last week I was talking to Brian from Reliable Comfort about a conversation that he had with a homeowner. The people had a house that was about 3200 square feet. Their electric bill was over $600 for 3 months in a row. They just thought that it was to be expected in that big of a house. When Brian looked into the crawl space he was shocked at how warm it was down there, and it did not take long for him to figure out why. Less than 10 feet from the opening was a vent pipe laying on the ground instead of being hooked onto the vent like it should have been. This started us talking about the types of things that we have found on a semi regular basis that are making homeowners buy more electricity or gas than they need to.
What we found in the crawlspace not only loose pipes, but that there were just a lot of holes. When the ductwork is put together there are holes on all 4 sides of each piece that you can stick a pencil in. That is 8 holes every 10 feet on average. On a 1200 square foot house that is 2 dozen pencils. Then when the hole for the supply pipe is cut, they are cut a little bit big to make sure that it fits. That same house has about 8 pipes in it. When it is all added up you could be losing 10 to 20 % of your heated air to your crawl space. Well at least the pipes and the spiders won’t get too cold.
We take a look at the attic, the return air is the pipes that pull the air back to the furnace. The holes that are in the attic often times are pulling in cold air in the winter that needs to be heated. The pipes are made the same way so they can have 10 to 20% of cold air coming into the furnace.
The first thing that most people think is “well we need to tape all that stuff up.” The problem with tape is that the glue dries out and it falls off. There is a product however that can be used to seal it up. It is a paste that is designed to handle the ductwork being hot in the winter time, and cold in the summer. If your experiencing air quality problems such as rooms being different temperatures or higher than usual utility bills, don’t settle for tape, give the guys at Reliable Comfort a call 812-524-9994