Daily Home Renovation Tips

Yesterday, I described the situation with the large air leaks around an air vent in our basement within a room where the ceiling was finished with drywall.

So, what was the best solution, other than ripping out the drywall around the ceiling vent, installing a new vent duct boot, etc. which I was not prepared to do. However, since this room was used very rarely … in fact we affectionately called it the boyfriend room … we used a vent blocker on the register to prevent heated air in the winter from entering the unused room. Having large air leaks prevented the vent blocker from doing much if the  heated air could simply escape through the large spaces between the unfinished vent boot and the register, as shown in yesterday’s article.

At first I thought about what Vasile had recommended to me last year, that being using insulating foam. I had received two different sealant foams from DAP late last year.

The first one, DAPtex, in the picture above, indicated on the product label that it could be used to seal vents and that it could be applied at temperatures between 45 and 105 degrees Fahrenheit. It did not say the maximum temperature to which it could be exposed. I used it to seal the gaps in the door frame of our cold cellar door. However, this concerned me, because as I showed last year my solar air heater was generating air exceeding at times 140 degrees Fahrenheit, which would be at least similar to heated air which would come through this ceiling vent from the furnace. Therefore, I decided not to use the DAPtex foam sealant product.

The second available product was DAP Kwik Foam, which was a polyurethane sealant, shown in the picture below:

For this second sealant, the product label indicated it should be applied at a temperature between 65 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit. It also indicated to not expose to heat exceeding 120 degrees Fahrenheit. So, based on the information on the product label I decided as well to not use this sealant product to seal the gaps between the rough edges of the air vent’s boot in our basement ceiling.

I could not find through some Internet searches a sealant with which I was satisfied. So, I went to Plan B.

What is used to seal duct work? Well, duct tape, right?

In looking around my basement work-area (who knew one day I would have a basement work area ), I found a partially used role of Polyken 260-17 Foilmastic sealing duct tape. Right on the exterior it indicated a maximum temperature of 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

Looks like I found my solution to sealing the air leaks in that basement room’s ceiling vent.

However, as you can tell from the picture above, the edges of the vent boot are very rough and sharp, sufficient to cut through any type of duct tape over time.