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One Beer Projects: Balancing Your A/C For The Summer

By Chuck Cage

Grab a beer and learn how to balance your A/C for the summertime, cooling down those warm room and warming up the cold ones.  It’s much easier than it sounds, and you can totally do it yourself; we’ll talk you through mapping your system, installing gates, and smoothing out kinks.  (Podcast Download)


This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 12:52 pm and is filed under One Beer Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “One Beer Projects: Balancing Your A/C For The Summer”

  1. John Says:
    May 9th, 2007 at 2:13 pm

    You mentioned the use of duct tape to reconnect your ducts after installation of a gate valve. I’d suggest that you use metallic foil tape instead of plain old duct tape. Metallic foil tape doesn’t deteriorate and lose its tackiness like duct tape. Even better would be to use sheet metal screws to secure things, then use the foil tape to seal things up.

    I found out the hard way that duct tape sucks for securing things like ducts when I did my regular check of my attic (about every 3 months I head up there and eyeball things to make sure everything is where it should be and that things look ok.). The flex duct off of the bathroom exhaust fan fell off because the previous owners just used duct tape to wrap it to the case of the fan. the tape dried out and lost its adhesive and the duct fell off. So all the bathroom moisture was being dumped in the attic, not good. The metallic foil tape won’t dry out and fall apart on you, and you won’t have to repair the thing again in a year or two.

  2. Dana Says:
    May 9th, 2007 at 10:15 pm

    There’s duct tape and then there’s the good stuff. It comes in all sorts of grades. The typical crap you get at the big box store is utility tape.
    Proper HVAC grade duct tape is heat rated and marked as such. Actually Code Approved.

    Flex duct connections should be made in stages over a sheet metal coupler. Skin the outer liner and insulation back, secure the inner liner to the sheetmetal with large zip tie AND proper duct tape. Then pull the outter liner and the insulation up over the sheet metal AND the other duct, zip tie again and seal with the duct tape again. A proper connection is required to withstand a 25 pound pull without separating.

    The silver metal tape is good for high heat applications or where moisture might be present. (such as bathroom fan ducting)

  3. Oliver Says:
    September 10th, 2007 at 2:54 pm

    A nice tip on how to seal ducts from the US Dept. of Energy site:

    “If you use tape to seal your ducts, avoid cloth-backed, rubber adhesive duct tape, which tends to fail quickly. Researchers recommend other products to seal ducts: mastic, butyl tape, foil tape, or other heatapproved tapes. Look for tape with the Underwriters Laboratories logo.”

    The following are a few of the materials can be used by the DIYer to seal duct connections (UL 181 approved):

    - Foil tape
    - Mastic adhesive (very effective when combined with foil tape)
    - Foam sealant

    You can also find some helpful information on how to seal ducts at
    http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/D/AE_duct_sealing.html

    Be sure to also evaluate the the return-air portion of your duct work before making changes to the balance.

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