How Air Ducts Impact Your Energy Bill
When it comes to reducing the power bill, you might have more than a few options at your disposal. Keep a fan on in the summer, and bundle up with a sweater when it’s cold to spare the heater from coming on. You can also improve insulation from walls, doors, and windows and upgrade to more efficient systems. That’s all great, and will definitely help! The greatest HVAC systems and insulation still might struggle if paired up with a dirty, unmaintained, or damaged air duct network. Your air ducts might have a larger impact on your energy bill than you might first assume! Here’s how air ducts impact your energy bill.
Dirty Air Ducts
Dirt and dust collect in your air ducts, it’s unavoidable. Having dirt and dust eventually reaching heat exchangers or condenser coils will eventually mean less warm or cool air respectively, plus the bonus of burning dust setting off your fire alarms every year.
Even if those aren’t being impacted, your HVAC system might be struggling with air circulation. All this dust and dirt mixed in with nasty things like dead skin from people, animals, and pests makes for a breeding ground of bacteria that can make you sick or have allergic reactions.
To make matters worse, having dusty HVAC parts and poor circulation means your system will come on and off again more frequently and that means more wear and tear, and more expenses down the road for maintenance, repair, or replacement.
Damaged Air Ducts
You may have poorly insulated or damaged air ducts as well. Generally, we’re piping air that is the opposite of the ambient temperature of the environment. If it’s really cold, we’re trying to deliver hot air to our rooms, and if it’s hot, then we want nice cool air.
Poor insulation means that while the air is in route to its destination, it’s slowly balancing temperature with the outside environment, meaning less of the air you want reaching you! Damaged ducts are essentially the same issue, but worse in that the preferred air is literally leaving the duct and going into unwanted places like inside the wall, or losing pressure before it reaches further into the house.
Again, this all equates to more HVAC usage, more wear and tear, and more expenses in an effort to maintain your home’s temperature.
Call Crawford for Ductwork Services Today
At the end of the day unmaintained, uninsulated, or damaged air ducts cost money in both the short and long term. Every month you’ll be paying more due to the uptick in energy use from your system repeatedly coming on to overcome the obstacles and maintain your home’s temperature.
As we’ve discussed previously, this repeated, and increased on and off behavior will lead to a shorter life for your HVAC system or parts. This means more maintenance costs, more part replacement, and the most costly of all, an entire HVAC system replacement. If you’d like to have your ducts cleaned, (or at least looked at), give Crawford Services a call today!
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