If you are interested in increasing your home’s efficiency, proper ductwork is essential! Many ducts are initially installed with faulty materials, which leaves you vulnerable to spending more money on cooling and heating your home. In addition, insulation and radiant barrier can help you keep your house just the right temperature and prevent wasting money and energy. There is nothing worse than knowing air is escaping your house and causing your energy bills to rise! Watch as Eric inspects this home’s attic as he explains some quick solutions involving ductwork.
Video Transcript
Well hey guys, my name is Eric Smith, thank you for joining us today. I’m with Accurate Electric, Plumbing, Heating, and Air. And what we’re going to be focusing on this house is the Attic and going through the attic and helping to find ways that we can improve the home’s efficiency. So we’re going to look at an opportunity of installing a radiant barrier to help the radiating heat coming from the sun, coming down through your shingles or the tiles on your roof, and entering your living space. Another thing we’re going to take a look at is insulation. And there’s a lot of options out there with insulation, our main concern is making sure that you have adequate insulation in the home. And while we’re up in the attic, of course, we’re going to take a look at the ductwork and find areas in that ductwork that can be made better so we’re not allowing hot or cool air that we paid money to heat and cool the house escape into the attic.
Well hey guys, thanks for joining us up in the attic. Around me you can see a bunch of building material, we’ve got lumber, you can see we’ve got a couple of different types of insulation blown in this attic, most importantly you see this old duct system right here. And what we’re going to be talking about is 3 things today that can help you improve your home’s efficiency by upgrades that can be done to your attic space. The first one that we’re going to talk about is your ductwork. And this ductwork all runs back to this point here, we call this a supply plenum, and you can see that when this system was installed they actually used duct tape, which has a 100% fail ratio. It gets hard, it crumbles, and it falls off over time, and then it leaves your duct system exposed where air can be leaking out of it. And so one solution that we’re going to have for this homeowner is coming back in and properly sealing up this ductwork. You will also notice behind me some brown and white blown insulation. I’m a huge fan of blown insulation because it completely covers the surface of the building structure. What we’re most focused on is not the type of insulation but that the Attic is properly insulated with the correct thickness of insulation to give them the r-value that the home is required to have. And the third and most important thing up in this attic is something you can’t see right now is how hot it is up here right. So it’s about 85 outside but in this attic, it’s 120 degrees. This hot air eventually makes its way into your house through pressure changes and so we want to do our best to shed this hot heat before it enters the house and one way that we get to do that is with a building product called a radiant barrier. A radiant barrier is installed underneath your roof-line and what it does is it stops the radiating heat coming in from your roof to enter this space that we’re in now. And so we control that heat with radiant barrier and we begin to shed it so we’re not having to battle that heat with your A/C system and spending a lot of money on electrical bills.
Well hey, thank you guys for joining us today as we crawled up into that attic. We were definitely able to figure out ways to improve this home’s efficiency- took a look at the opportunity of radiant barrier, attic insulation, and sealing up that ductwork. Thank you for joining us, have a great day.
