Ductwork Repair and Sealing in Ypsilanti and Southeast Michigan

The ductwork in a Southeast Michigan house is usually older than every piece of equipment attached to it and has never once been looked at. A 1950s ranch in Westland or Garden City has a sheet-metal trunk along the basement ceiling with branch runs to each room and returns that are nothing more than the space between two floor joists with a sheet of metal nailed underneath. A 1990s colonial in Canton or Pittsfield Township has a metal trunk with flex duct branches stapled between trusses in the attic and a single return in the upstairs hall. Both leak. Field studies put typical duct leakage at 20 to 30 percent of the air the blower moves, and every bit of that is DTE gas or electricity spent heating or cooling a basement, an attic or a wall cavity instead of a bedroom. Temprasure repairs and seals ductwork across Washtenaw and western Wayne County, and it is the fix for a lot of complaints that get blamed on the furnace.

The complaints are consistent. One room is always five degrees off. The upstairs is hot in summer and the basement is the only comfortable place in the house. The furnace runs for ten minutes and shuts off on its high limit because the return cannot bring back enough air. The air conditioner freezes every July for the same reason. The house is dusty a week after cleaning because a return in the basement is pulling air from the crawlspace through an open joist bay. The duct that fed the back bedroom came apart years ago when someone ran a cable, and it has been heating the ceiling of the basement ever since. We hear every one of those weekly, and we start with a static pressure reading and a look at the ducts before anyone talks about replacing equipment.

Repair means several things depending on what we find. A disconnected or crushed run gets reconnected or replaced. A trunk joint that was never sealed gets mastic, which is a paste applied by brush that cures hard and does not peel the way tape does. Flex duct that sags between trusses and kinks at every turn gets supported or replaced with a shorter, straighter run. A return that is pulling from the wrong place gets sealed at the joist bay and rerouted. An undersized return, which is the single most common cause of high static pressure in the houses we see, gets a second return or a larger grille and a filter cabinet that does not choke the blower. Where the leakage is spread across hundreds of small joints throughout the system, an aerosol sealing process of the Aeroseal type, which pressurizes the ducts and seals leaks from the inside, does what no amount of mastic can reach, and we can arrange it for houses where the leakage justifies it.

We measure before and after. Static pressure across the system tells us whether the blower is fighting the ducts; a register-by-register airflow check tells us which runs are starving; and a comparison after the repair proves the fix did something. That matters because duct repair is easy to oversell. Not every house needs sealing, and some houses with one disconnected run and one undersized return are fixed in an afternoon. We tell you what we found, what each fix does, and which items are optional.

Duct repair is often the best money a homeowner spends on comfort, because it makes the equipment already in the basement do what it was supposed to. It is also what makes a new furnace or air conditioner perform when the time comes, which is why we check the ducts on every installation estimate.