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.

My home office is not comfortable

Since the pandemic hit my partner and I have been, like many Canadians with desk jobs, working from home (okay I don’t always work from home and love the days when I am outside measuring other’s homes and talking with you about your comfort issues). Today, I want to share a bit about my home office and the steps I am taking to make it more comfortable.

A caveat: calling the space an office is quite a generous term. We are in a 3 bedroom semi and with 3 kids, the office is also the master bedroom. But during the day, it serves as an office so hereonin I will refer to it as my home office.

As the temperatures have dipped below zero recently, you’ll often find me working with a blanket wrapped around me and a hot cup of tea on the desk. Sometimes I even don a hat.

Many of us (myself included) would have tried cranking the thermostat or even speculated that our furnace was not sized big enough. Now that I’m an energy advisor, I know that more often than not the path to comfort involves insulation and air sealing rather than upsizing a fossil burning piece of mechanical equipment that has a lifespan of 10 years (although there are times when a heating system is not sized properly and as an energy advisor I am also trained to check this too!)

So what’s the plan? First up, our ducts. This is an area that energy advisors, home inespectors and even HVAC installers don’t typically look at. But I know that my ducts are leaky as the air coming into one of the other bedrooms on the second floor is much more forceful than what is entering my home office. This was confirmed when I brought in Victor. Victor is with Aeroseal Tech. With a free home quote, he confirmed my suspicions, the air flow to my home office is half of what I’m getting from other vents. He was able to determine that at least 30% of my heat wasn’t making it to where it should. Meaning, my ducts are leaky and the heat, rather than getting pushed upstairs, is getting lost in the basement (where we don’t really need it) and in the walls where it slowly dissipates out. You may not think that this is a problem as the heat makes it upstairs eventually (temperature differences like many things in life naturally seek to balance out, I’ll save the physics lessson for later). But the problem is actually two-fold. Not enough hot air is getting to my home office and what little that does get there is leaking out of my home too quickly making that room constantly 2-3 degrees colder that what I’d like.

That brings me to the next section. You might be wondering why this room alone has issues. Part of it is because of leaky ductwork but the other part is because a good portion of the walls are exposed and poorly insulated. The ceiling is above a small attic that most definitely does not (yet!) have any insulation in it. The front wall also does not (yet!) have any insulation. A third of the floor is actually exposed (it hangs over our porch) and it too is not insulated (yet!). So there are both A LOT of exposed walls in this room and most of them are poorly insulated. The only side that is exposed and insulated is the right which has 2” of continuous insulation underneath the siding (we added this when we redid the siding). By putting my hand on the decently insulated and the poorly insulated walls I can feel an extreme temperature difference.

So the plan involves fixing my leaky ductwork and insulating the exposed walls. Two of the three exposed walls have framing and I plan to have cellulose blown inbetween the studs. Then, when we can take on a bigger project, we’ll add more insulation at the same as time when we redo the roof and the siding on the front of the house.

As far as insulating walls goes, blowing in cellulose between the studs is a relatively uninvasive low-cost approach. A insulating company will drill 2” holes between the studs, fill them with insulation, and patch over the walls leaving me with warm comfy walls and only a few spots that need to be painted over. We’re timing this work so that it’s done before we need to repaint.

I’ve started getting quotes on the insulation work and have the duct sealing scheduled for next Wednesday. I am SOOO looking forward to a more comfortable office in 2021! I promise to keep you posted on my home comfort adventures. If you have a problem with an uncomfortable home office, I’d love to chat and see if we can help!

How to find and fix drafts and air leaks

Many of you already know that Trish Long and I have recently become Registered Energy Advisors. We pursued this accreditation because energy advisors take a building science approach to analyzing a home. If you’ve ever had an audit done, you know that an advisor is able to both assess your home’s current energy consumption AND make upgrade recommendations. The recommendations usually fall into several categories including windows, walls, doors, new heating system, etc. however most often air sealing is at the top of the list.

Performaing an air leakage test using a blower door

An Energy Audit will provide you with a calculation of how much heat is lost in your home through leaks. A typical Toronto home loses approximately 30% - 40% of its heat through cracks. These small gaps may be around your plumbing intake, along your window trim,or even in your attic around your top floor potlights.

Air sealing is, for most homeowners, the low-hanging fruit that you can either tackle on your own or hire a professional firm like Goldfinch Energy.

Goldfinch recently air sealed three homes, each requiring a different approach. In all cases we used a blower door to simulate a 20+ km/h wind, which clearly identifies a home’s air leaks. With just a few hours of effort, we were able to significantly reduce air leakage and the homeowners were able to feel a noticeable difference in the reduction of uncomfortable drafts.

At the first home, air was leaking in between where the basement wall ends and the subfloor begins (this area is called a floor header). Spray foam was the best solution in this case because the basement is going to remain unfinished for now. Spray foam does the best job when it comes to air sealing cracks between 0.5” - 3”. You can purchase a can of it at your local hardware store. If you plan to do this yourself, be sure to read the instructions carefully, shake the can before use, wear PPE and don’t wipe up fallen drips but instead wait for them to dry.

At the second home, there were two gas fireplaces that had a noticable amount of air leakage around the edges. These leaks, although small in width but approximately 8’ in length, were sealed up with fire retardant clear caulk. As the fireplaces were focal points in the home, I made sure the caulking wasn’t noticable at all. We also sealed along the baseboards and addressed sources of air leakage in the unfinished basement.

Rockwool is an environmentally-friendly insulation choice for walls, attics and crawlspaces.

Windows are a common source of air leakage. If you don’t want to replace them, there are often ways to reduce the air leaks around them.

For the third home, half of the footprint of the main floor was over an unfinished crawl space, making the room above unnecessarily chilly. Trish and I spent a fun-filled morning crawling in and adding R14 worth of Rockwool between the framing and then covering this with professional spray foam (these kits are best for covering larger areas and should only be applied by a professional).

If you aren’t sure where your air leaks are, hire building science experts from Goldfinch Energy who can identify them using a blower door. For minimal cost, you’ll have noticeable improvements and we’ll share the measurable results from the blower door test with you. You’ll be well on your way to making your home more comfortable and energy efficient.