Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael G.
Wife and I attended a seminar at a home demonstration on
attic wrapping an attic with a space age vented foil laid over the insulation to keep the heat from the attic off our ceilings in the house.
Also, they talk about wrapping that same vented foil around our ventilation ducts, in the attic and water heater.
Google says ventilation ducts in Florida last 15 -20 years.
Anyone know anything about this, especially wrapping the ducts in foil?
Thanks
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Your hard ducts are made of a fiberglass and glue product with foil on the outside. Adding another thin layer of foil wouldn’t help at all. These inch-thick hard ducts don’t insulate very much, but they insulate far more than the metal ducts used in past decades. You could add insulation by attaching foam board to them somehow, but I don’t know how much it would save you.
Attic insulation around here has often been trampled down by workers and isn’t working at its peak, so that R-38 may actually be R-15 in many places. Probably the most effective way of cutting your cooling costs would be to have another foot of fiberglass blown in. This is fast and not too expensive. It would also cover up most of the soft ducts (two layers of plastic bag material with a little bit of fiberglass and a coil spring in between). Then those ducts would have, say R-20 insulation around them instead of R-1. I wouldn’t be surprised if this cut your electric bill by $500 a year.