Your ducts leak a quarter of the air you pay to condition

Why ductwork is Charlotte's quietest money pit

The Department of Energy's long-standing estimate is that typical homes lose 20–30% of conditioned air to duct leakage, and Charlotte housing stock is built to hit the high end: vented crawlspaces, long flex-duct runs, and panned joist returns in the older neighborhoods that were never sealed at all. Every leaky supply joint dumps air you paid to cool into a 95° crawlspace; every leaky return inhales that crawlspace's damp, musty air and delivers it to your bedrooms. You feel it as rooms that never match the thermostat — and you pay for it as a system that runs an extra hour a day.

Duct sealing typically runs $900–$2,800 depending on access and scope, and it's one of the few HVAC investments that shows up on the very next power bill. It also makes every future system cheaper: right-sized equipment plus tight ducts can mean buying a half-ton less machine at replacement time.

Test first. Always.

We start with a duct blaster pressure test — the duct system gets pressurized and we measure exactly how much it leaks, in CFM, before anything gets quoted. Then a camera run through the trunks to find the specific failures: disconnected boots, crushed flex, rodent damage (it happens), and the unsealed panned returns older Plaza Midwood and NoDa homes hide between joists. The quote you get lists each repair as its own line item, so you can fix the worst offenders now and the rest later if budget says so.

Sealing, insulating, cleaning — in that order

• Sealing: mastic and collar repairs at every joint and boot — not the cloth "duct tape" that ironically fails on ducts faster than anywhere else.
• Insulating: R-8 wrap on supply runs through unconditioned space, so summer crawlspace heat stops re-warming your cooled air on the trip to the register.
• Cleaning: negative-pressure cleaning with agitation, honestly recommended only when there's a reason — visible growth, renovation dust, rodent history, or that musty smell at startup. If your ducts don't need cleaning, we'll say so.

When the work's done, we run the pressure test again and put both numbers on your invoice. Typical result on an older Charlotte crawlspace system: leakage drops from the high-20s to single digits — air your registers get back immediately.