A person can be forgiven for not knowing much about their home’s air duct system. It plays a vital role in the home’s forced-air heating and cooling system, performing its job quietly and without much attention. The return air ducts in an HVAC system are especially liable to get taken for granted, even though their part in heating and cooling your home is just as essential as supply ducts.
Here’s how a typical forced-air HVAC system works. Starting with the creation of cool or warm air in the actual furnace, air conditioner or heat pump. After the air is conditioned, a blower or air handler blows the air through supply ductwork, which delivers it to rooms throughout your house, where it emerges from registers and vents. The air has to have some way to return to the HVAC equipment, and that’s where return air ducts and vents enter the picture. The same fan operation that delivers air to your home’s rooms draws that air back to the equipment via return ducts.
Placement and design of return air ducts and vents is a crucial factor in how efficiently and effectively conditioned air will circulate in your home.
It’s important that roughly the same amount of air moves through supply ducts as return ducts, in order to maintain neutral air pressure in rooms. If supply air doesn’t have a way to return to return ducts, it will leak out of the house through cracks and openings in the home’s outer envelope. In the winter, this means you’re losing heat energy to the outside, and rooms won’t stay warm for long. For this reason, it’s important that house construction doesn’t scrimp on return vents and ducts. Ideally, there should be a return register or vent in every room where a supply register is located. If that’s not possible, there should be easy airflow between rooms, via such strategies as air pass-through grilles in doors or jumper ducts in ceilings.
For advice on optimizing the performance of the ductwork in your Dayton area home, please contact us at Ace Hardware Home Services, Inc.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Dayton, Ohio about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).
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