Daily Home Renovation Tips

In our series on Home Energy Conservation we recently reviewed the ideas within the Un-Official Guide to Home Energy Conservation relating to cheap or inexpensive ways to reduce a home’s heating and cooling utility bills. One of the methods (#23) suggested was to use duct tape to close the gaps in a homes heating and cooling ducts.

Today and tomorrow we review two different uses recently made in our home using duct tape. Today’s focus will be about the issue we had with the ceiling vent cover in the basement bedroom of our home.

Last summer we wrote about how we used butterfly type anchors to install a vent cover in the drop ceiling of our basement. Once the vent cover was secured within the ceiling tile, it looked pretty good from the ‘outside’.

While this approached worked very well to keep the vent cover secure within the drop ceiling panel, it exposed an issue with the installation of the original duct work. In the picture below you see the gap between the duct opening and the vent cover. At the bottom of this picture, you can see the white butterfly anchor doing it’s thing.

This large gap leads to much of the heated air in the winter and cooled air in the summer not going directly into the basement bedroom through the vent but remaining in that space between the drop ceiling tiles and the main floor.

One solution would have been to adjust the duct work. Another solution could have been to replace the existing ceiling tile with a new one, cut out the hole for the vent cover which was better alighed to the duct opening. However, this would not have done anyting by itself to place the vent cover actually inside the duct’s vent opening.

So the solution we used was to apply duct tape along the different sides of gap.

Duct tape is cheap, anywhere from $5 a roll and up, and available from just about any hardware or building supply store.

So, I simply proceeded to cut pieces of the duct tape a little longer than each of the 4 sides of the opening and apply one at a time.

It took only  a few minutes to do and no special tools were needed.

The difference was immediate. Now the heated air in the winter does directly into the basement bedroom. And, when the part time resident of that basement bedroom came home from over the year end holidays, she said that the room did feel much warmer and that she hardly used the portable electric heater compared to last winter.

Sure, the finished product looks a little messy. However, this goes to show that you don’t heed to be a Picasso when it comes to using duct tape. Just do the best you can and do what needs to be done. No one, not even your relatives will actually take down a ceiling tile to examine your work; or, will they?

So, when it comes to heating and cooling energy conservation tactics in your home, don’t forget to look at the connection between duct vent openings and the vent covers in your basement. If they are as mis-aligned as was this one was, take a few minutes and apply some duct tape.

The result will be a warmer (in the winter) area needing less alternate heating (in our case the portable electric room heater) or less usage of the furnace (again, in the winter) which will reduce your home heating bills, saving you money and everyone else the planet, little by little.