Fight The Chill: Insulating Your Furnace Ducts

Ideally, all of your heating ducts should run through the insulated spaces of your home, but sometimes ducts don't fit within walls or ceilings. In this case, they will take away from the space inside your home. Thus, architects will sometimes put ducts inside the attic or crawl space of your home.  However, ducts outside of the insulation envelope of your home may not properly insulated. In order to save money on your heating costs, you should check your ducts, and if they are not properly insulated, insulate them.

Uninsulated Ducts and Inefficiency

Ducts that are not insulated can be chilled by the cold air that seeps into an attic or crawl space. Then when hot air from the furnace flows through the chilled ducts, they will cool the air. The cooled air will take longer to heat up your home, which makes your furnace work harder. The harder and longer your furnace works, the more you have to pay to heat your home. 

Insulating Your Ducts

If you find that your ducts do not have the insulation they require, you can fix the problem on your own. The following steps will guide you through the process:

1. Measure the circumference of your ducts. 

2. Measure and cut a bat of insulation so that it is about two inches longer than the circumference of your ducts.

3. Find an easily accessible side of your ducts and use duct tape to tape down one end of your bat of insulation.

4. Wrap the bat around the duct until the second end of the bat overlaps the first by about two inches. Tape down the second end. 

5. Measure and cut another bat of insulation. Instead of laying it right next to your first bat of insulation, overlap the first by about two inches. 

6. Tape down the first end of the bat, wrap it around the duct, then tape down the second end just as you did with your first bat.

7. Continue adding bats in this way until you have covered the entire length of your ducts. 

Installing insulation on the ducts in your home is not as difficult as you might think. As long as you have the skills needed to measure and cut insulation, you should have no problem. Once in place, your insulation should help you to decrease the cost of heating your home through the long, barren months of winter. Contact a company like Cape Fear Air Conditioning & Heating Co., Inc. for more heating advice.