If you’re having a new home built for you or doing major renovations to an existing one, you have the perfect opportunity to incorporate modern ductwork design that will provide maximum home comfort coupled with real energy savings. If you’d like to achieve some of the savings benefit but can’t afford a re-design of existing ductwork, at least have any leaks sealed and make sure ductwork is properly insulated.
Proper Ductwork Design
Proper design of a duct network ensures that all the rooms in a home are kept at a comfortable temperature through a balanced system of supply and return ducts that are well insulated and free of leakage. The design is somewhat different between the supply ducts and the return ducts.
- Supply ducts should be placed within the conditioned areas of the home: for instance, in dropped ceilings or room corners. There are four different popular configurations for supply ducts: the trunk and branch, radial, spider and perimeter loop setups. Each of these distributes air from a central location to outlying room destinations through the ductwork in between.
- Return ducts are set up in one of two configurations. In the first, each room has a duct that returns stale air back to the heating or cooling equipment, and in the second there would be return grills established in central locations for each floor of the house. When using the central grill installation, grills need to be installed which let air escape from closed rooms, or else ducts must be installed between adjacent rooms that connect the vents and allow air to flow back to the central grills.
It has been estimated that properly designed and maintained ductwork can achieve more than 80 percent efficiency.
Contact Us
We at Arpi’s Industries Ltd. have been serving the home comfort needs of residential and commercial customers in the Calgary area for more than 50 years. If you need expert advice on any home comfort concerns, please contact us through our website or stop in and see us so we can discuss them.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Calgary, Alberta about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about ductwork and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide. Image courtesy of Shutterstock
