Your Ducts Are Probably Wasting Energy
If your Scott home was built in the last 30 years, there’s a good chance your ductwork was installed during a building boom when speed was the priority. Flex duct strung through attic trusses, fastened with minimal support, and connected with tape rather than mastic. At the time of installation, it probably worked fine. After 10 to 20 years in a Louisiana attic, the story changes.
Heat breaks down tape adhesive. Support straps dig into duct insulation. Connections at register boots loosen. The flexible outer jacket becomes brittle. And slowly, your duct system transitions from a sealed air delivery network to a leaky collection of tubes dumping conditioned air into your attic.
You might not realize this is happening because the decline is gradual. Your energy bills creep up a few dollars at a time. Rooms get slightly less comfortable each summer. The AC runs a little longer than it used to. By the time the problem is obvious, your duct system has been wasting energy for years.
Testing Before Guessing
We don’t walk into your attic, glance at the ductwork, and tell you it all needs replacing. That’s not how we work.
Our duct evaluation starts with a pressurized leakage test. We seal off your supply and return registers, pressurize the duct system, and measure how much air escapes. This gives us a precise number, expressed as cubic feet per minute of leakage at a standardized test pressure. That number tells us whether your ducts need minor sealing, major repair, or full replacement.
We also inspect the physical condition of each run, looking for sag, kinks, crushed sections, disconnected joints, and damaged insulation. The leakage test and visual inspection together paint a complete picture of your duct system’s health.
Sealing vs. Replacing
If your ductwork is properly sized and reasonably well-routed but has leaky connections, sealing is the right move. Professional mastic sealing at every joint and seam can recover most of your lost airflow without the cost of full replacement. Mastic bonds permanently to metal and flex duct surfaces and handles the temperature swings in your attic without cracking or peeling.
Replacement makes more sense when the ductwork itself has failed: collapsed flex duct runs, severely undersized ducts that can’t deliver enough air to certain rooms, or systems so deteriorated that sealing every leak would cost as much as starting fresh.
When we do replace ductwork, we use a combination of metal trunk lines (fabricated in our own Abbeville sheet metal shop) and properly supported flex duct branch runs. Every component is sized using Manual D calculations to ensure your system moves the right volume of air to each room.
The Insulation Factor
Attic duct insulation is often overlooked, but in Scott’s climate it has a direct impact on your cooling performance. Your AC produces 55 to 60-degree air at the unit. If that air travels through ducts surrounded by 140-degree attic heat with only R-4 insulation (or none), it arrives at the register 10 to 15 degrees warmer than it should be.
R-8 is the Louisiana minimum for attic duct insulation. We check the R-value stamped on every duct we evaluate and upgrade insulation where it falls short. On metal duct runs, we wrap with foil-faced fiberglass and seal every seam. The investment pays back through lower energy consumption and more consistent room temperatures.
Scott Ductwork Service
F & R Air Conditioning works on duct systems throughout Scott and the surrounding area. If your home has rooms that never seem to cool properly, or if your energy bills don’t match your usage, give us a call at (337) 893-5646. A duct test can tell us whether your ducts are part of the problem.