Ductwork Design Is Essential, If You Want Optimal Comfort
For optimal home comfort, you need more than efficient heating and cooling components. Though often overlooked, ducts play an essential role in efficiently distributing conditioned air throughout your home. In fact, if your ductwork is improperly designed, installed or sealed, up to 20 percent of the conditioned air that passes through your ducts could be lost.
Whether you’re designing a new heating and cooling system or simply evaluating an existing duct configuration, there are several factors to consider when assessing the efficiency of your duct system:
- Successful ductwork design takes the floor plan of your home into consideration, and avoids stretching or kinking ducts in order to work around obstructions.
- In residential settings, radial and trunk-and-branch configurations are common. With a trunk-and-branch configuration, smaller ducts branch off from a larger trunk. With a radial system, ducts reach out from the furnace.
- No matter the configuration of your ductwork, proper sealing is essential to optimal system efficiency. If you suspect accessible ducts of leaking, seal them using mastic or metal tape. To ensure duct sealing is done thoroughly, especially in those areas that aren’t easily reached, consult a professional.
- As there will always be some degree of leakage with even the best-sealed ductwork, successful designs often place ducts in conditioned areas of the home. For those ducts that must run through non-conditioned areas, adequate insulation is recommended.
- In some homes, ducts are run through existing wall cavities. Always be sure actual ductwork has been installed in these areas. This not only prevents air loss, it keeps your system from sucking in unwanted contaminants and circulating them throughout your home.
- Also important to successful air distribution is the placement of registers and returns. If you don’t have returns in every room, some precaution should be taken to ensure adequate circulation even when doors are closed. Options include connecting rooms with jumper ducts and undercutting doors.
Whether you’re installing ducts in a new construction or wish to have your existing configuration evaluated, our technicians at Symbiont Service are standing by to answer your questions.
Our goal is to help educate our customers about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about ductwork and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
Symbiont Service Corp. serves Englewood, Florida and the surrounding areas. Visit our website to see our special offers and get started today!
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
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