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This article is sponsored by State Automatic Heating and Cooling.
If your house was built before 2015 or so, there's a decent chance you're paying to heat and cool air that never actually makes it to all of your rooms.
That's not your fault; it’s just how ductwork has been installed for decades. Metal sections snap together, and those seams and corners leak air as it travels down your ductwork and airflow weakens as it reaches the rooms at the end of the ductwork run.
This is why “Sally’s room never gets cool,” or “my basement feels like a meat locker, while my upstairs is not cool,” customers of Batavia-based State Automatic Heating & Cooling often say.
The U.S. Department of Energy estimates the average home loses 25-40% of its conditioned air this way, and puts the national average at roughly 30 cents of every dollar spent on heating and cooling.
It's also why some rooms in your house may never quite feel like the right temperature no matter what the thermostat says. The air that's supposed to reach them is escaping, likely into the attic or basement.
State Automatic fixes this problem with a technology called Aeroseal, and it's worth understanding before your next AC or furnace tune-up.
How does duct sealing from the inside even work?
Instead of a technician crawling through your attic taping seams by hand, not to mention the inaccessible ductwork that is behind your walls, Aeroseal adds pressure to your duct system and releases a fine, food grade, non-toxic aerosol sealant from the inside of the ductwork. This means no interruption to the home.
The particles float through the ductwork and stick wherever there's a gap, building on themselves until each leak closes from the inside out. A computer tracks the leak size shrinking in real time, giving you a before-and-after measurement.
The effectiveness is well-documented: this sealing process came out of Department of Energy-funded research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and more than 25,000 residential systems have been sealed with it.
The sealant fills gaps up to about half an inch wide, and there’s no lingering odor once the job is finished.
This quick animation video shows you how it works:
Aeroseal in action
The “This Old House “segment below offers a nice, simple explainer.
On a new-construction home, host Kevin O'Connor and an HVAC contractor ran a live test: they pressurized an unsealed duct system and measured the leakage at 30 CFM — equivalent to a hole in your ductwork about the size of a credit card.
After running Aeroseal for about 30 minutes, that same system tested at zero leakage.
What does this actually change in your house?
A few things homeowners tend to notice right away:
Rooms even out. The room farthest from your furnace that's always too hot in summer or too cold in winter usually isn't a furnace or AC problem. It’s a duct leak problem. Once the ducts are sealed, air actually reaches the end of the line.
Less dust. A lot of the dust and musty smell people blame on their furnace is actually attic or crawlspace air getting pulled in through leaky return ducts. Sealed ducts cut that off.
Lower bills. Attic and crawlspace duct runs (the most common leak points in older Fox Valley homes) typically see 15-20% heating and cooling savings once sealed.
Most homeowners see the investment pay for itself within 3-7 years, and it comes with a 10-year guarantee (Aeroseal has also held up in testing for 40+ years).
It's only a few hours of work, and you can expect minimal disruption to the house while it's happening and feel immediate results when it’s completed.
Worth checking before your next tune-up
If your ductwork predates the newer building codes requiring sealed systems, or you've got a room that's never been comfortable no matter what you do, this is worth a look at some point this summer.
State Automatic offers a free, no-obligation assessment. Call 630-879-8600 and ask for Bob or Kathy.
Or learn more on State Automatic’s website.
State Automatic Heating and Cooling is a sponsor of Tri-Cities Central.
📖 Thanks for reading
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