Amazing fix for too hot or too cold rooms

I’ve only been conducting energy audits for a few months now but I already see homeowners struggling with the same problem over and over. Rooms that are too hot in summer and too cold in winter. People usually blame the windows or insulation but I often find that leaky ductwork is to blame. It’s not hard to check if this could be happening in your home. Turn on the heat (or cooling in the summer) and feel with your hand how strong the airflow is in the problem room(s). People always tell me they can feel some air but I point out that if it’s blowing less than in other rooms, that room is going to be less comfortable. The good news is that problem ductwork is fixable using Aeroseal technology. 

Last summer I had two rooms on my second floor that were way too hot. It drove my teenage son to move to the basement and my husband to a makeshift office on the main floor. That left me sweltering upstairs looking into solutions. Luckily I discovered Aeroseal technology which has since transformed these rooms completely. By fixing our home’s ductwork, conditioned air now comes blasting out of the vents.

The Aeroseal crew found three ‘ducts to nowhere’ behind the drywall in my basement ceiling. Because so much conditioned air was being lost here, three rooms on my second floor weren’t receiving enough.

So how did Aeroseal Tech do it? The first step was to cover our vents and then hook up some software to report on rogue air loss from the ducts. In my case, a whopping 45% of my home’s conditioned air was leaking out somewhere behind the walls or between the floors. Using a thermal camera, the crew was able to pinpoint three problematic spots in my basement ceiling. They cut these open and showed me that I had three open ducts going absolutely nowhere. Unbelievable! It was the result of a renovation done in the early 80s and no one had bothered to seal them up when an addition had made them redundant.

An aerosol containing an acrylic compound is being blown into my ductwork filling all cracks and gaps up to the size of a loonie.

Once the crew closed up the gaping holes, the Aeroseal technology came into play. The crew blows an aerosol containing an acrylic compound into the ductwork and it sticks to any gaps, cracks and openings in the ductwork, up to the size of a loonie. A lot of old ductwork is just fastened together with metal bands and using a thermal camera you can see that air leaks out from every join. In my home, the Aeroseal technology worked so well that my duct leakage went from 45% to less than 1%. 

As a final step, the crew measures the airflow from each vent before and after and adds vent dampers as necessary to get the air flow as even as possible in every room. The result in my home, absolutely amazing! I can’t believe we didn’t know about this solution sooner but very few people think about their ductwork. Home inspectors don’t mention it in their reports and energy advisors rarely notice it either (except the energy advisors at Goldfinch of course!) I think we’re just raised to make do in older homes but it’s better to proactively find solutions that improve comfort.

The rooms that were uncomfortable before are now prime real estate in our house. Funny though, my teenage son has decided to stay in the basement. After I used the service, my business partner Sarah Grant also had her ducts fixed and now she doesn’t have to wear a toque in her office anymore. It’s not an inexpensive service at $1,500 to $2,200 but we both found it was very good value and we wish we’d done it years ago. A client of ours also had it done recently and the crew found Toronto Star newspaper pages from 1976 shoved in her ducts. Older homes can be uncomfortable but it doesn’t need to be that way! If you need any advice don’t hesitate to reach out.