Ductwork Saga

When it first started to get cold this winter, I noticed that one of our heaters didn't seem to be working properly. The master bedroom would never get very warm. Air was barely coming out of the vents. Since the heater was under warranty, I had a company out to look at it, but they said it was working fine. They couldn't figure out why it wasn't coming out of the vents. I began to suspect that the ducts might be leaking in the attic.




There was already a small water-damaged spot on our ceiling in the master bedroom, so I cut a small hole there. When I turned the heater on, air came out of the hole I had just cut a lot harder than the vents. I climbed up there and figured out that our ducts were completely disconnected! I couldn't see down into where the disconnect was, so I stuck my camera over the edge, facing straight down, and this is what I saw (below.) All winter, all of our heat was blowing out of that duct and heating our attic!!

I couldn't reach that duct to pull it back up, so I found an old hook in the garage and taped it to a long metal cord. I used that to hook the duct and pull it back up. I drilled a couple holes in the duct and screwed it into the framework of the attic so it wouldn't get disconnected again, and then I used some metal tape (you're not supposed to use duct tape on ducts!) to seal it to the other duct. The only money I spent on this repair was buying the metal tape, and the AC/Heater company wanted to charge us over $2,000!

Next step was repairing the hole in our ceiling, which I had never done before. But it wasn't too difficult. I bought a small square of drywall, cut the hole even bigger so my square would fit, screwed drywall screws into the joists to hold it up.

























Then my father-in-law got in town, and he helped me apply the drywall mud, and drywall tape, sand it down, and then apply texture from a texture can.



















Below is the finished product. It doesn't look that great at the moment, but once we paint it you won't even be able to tell it was there.