How HVAC Contractors Can Seal 90% of Duct Leaks Without Replacing Ductwork | Dr. Mark Modera Part 2
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AC SmartSeal, the professional's choice. This is part two with Dr. Mark Madera, and he explained what AeroSeal was on the last podcast. In this episode, part two of the two-part series, I ask him how you could potentially use this product if you're a contractor and potentially how you become a dealer of the product because it seems like a good choice.

feather in your cap or something to have in your tool bag if you can offer this service to people. So we talk about this a little bit on this podcast and talk about the product a little bit more in depth as well. So this is the HVAC Know It All podcast. I'm your host,

Gary McCready. This podcast is sponsored by Master and if you guys are looking for additional training, commercial and residential training, reach out to your local rep because here in Ontario and even out west they have training facilities and they are doing consistent and constant training on different things, commercial and residential.

and residential. So check them out guys, check out master.ca. This podcast is sponsored by Cintas and if you're looking for blue collar uniforms or anything that's an accessory to a blue collar uniform, check out cintas.com forward slash HVAC know-it-all for your blue collar uniform needs. Welcome to the HVAC know-it-all podcast recorded from a basement somewhere in Toronto, Canada.

Your host and HVAC tech, Gary McCready, will take you on a deep dive into the industry discussing all things HVAC, from storytelling to technical discussion. Enjoy the show.

All right. Now you have to hire somebody that's trained on doing this. Let me ask you this because I'm learning. Do we have to hire a specific company to come out and do this or can any residential company absorb this into their services and learn how to do it and have it done in-house? So basically in the residential, it sounds like in the residential retrofit or new construction market,

All of those guys are trained by us. They get the machines from us. But the people who do it range from duct cleaning companies to HVAC companies and solar companies, various companies. So there's different contractors who've done it. It's not a DIY. We talked about trying to make it DIY, but the risks seem like too high. Yeah, I would say, yeah.

And so then the service providers, and there's probably like, I don't know, several, more than 500 of them around the U.S. and Canada. And they could be any HVAC contractor. And I know one of our current initiatives is trying to make the equipment much smaller and easier to run and quicker to set up.

And in that initiative, the idea is that any HVAC install crew or replacement crew can have it on their truck and just pull it out and do it while they're doing the job. That's not happening yet, but that's what the goal. Okay, so people listening to this probably are wondering what it could cost the homeowner to do this type of work. Do you know what the average cost to the homeowner would be? Unfortunately, I don't know anymore. Okay.

Let's just say my role in the company right now is I'm the chief technical, chief scientific advisor. So I worry about like, where do we go with the technology? How do we do commercial buildings? We're actually doing buildings in Saudi Arabia and figuring out how to do that stuff. So that's what I do. I used to know, but I could make up a number. That's fine. No, that's fine. So then people would have to do. Just like the person who set this up with me, they'll know.

They'll tell you. They'd have to do, so, okay, so the contractors listening to this would have to do their own legwork. So they would, they would, how would they find somebody in the area that's able to provide them

pricing or provide them training in the machine and all that kind of stuff? Okay. The training in the machine, they would just contact Aerosil directly. Aerosil directly. Okay. They would just contact them and Aerosil, they just go to the website and say, you want to be a dealer? I've not done it, but I'm almost sure that that works. So they would just go to Aerosil and ask. And they could ask Aerosil, A, what if I want to become a dealer? Or B,

What if I wanted to subcontract to somebody who in my area does it?

So they could do it either way. Gotcha. All right. Now let's get back to the science of how it all works, because I think that's a cool conversation to have on its own. The actual component that is blown into the duck, like is, I, yeah, obviously there's probably things you can't talk about, but so what is it based from? Like, is there, is a chemical base or how, how does it all work? Okay. So I

I think the simplest sort of scientific explanation for it is just not a lot of chemistry going on. It's mostly physics. All right. And so essentially what you're doing is you're creating solid sticky balls of sealant. It's water-based. You evaporate away the water and you're left with a little ball of sealant. And the trick, the magic, if you'd like, is you have to pick the right size sealant ball

And the way you create that is by how you run your nozzles and all that kind of stuff. Such that when you, and you keep the right flow through the duct system so that it stays suspended in the air as the air goes through the duct system. So if you think about it, go back to the practical for a moment. If you block all the grills in a duct system, the only place of the air to go if you pressurize it is to the leaks. So what happens is the air goes to the leaks. It brings these little balls of sealant with it.

And then when the air goes out through the leak, essentially that little ball, see how it skids out and smacks into the side of the leak. So the analogy that I use is like driving your car. If I drive a car on a freeway, you can go around big sweeping turns.

and you don't crash. You don't slide out. But if you try to take a turn in downtown at 90 miles an hour, what's going to happen is you're going to skid out and your car's going to slide and smash and park cars on the far side of the street. So the car is the particle, the duct is the freeway, and the leak is the sharp turn downtown. So basically what happens is

when these particles go to make the turn, they skid and they hit and they smack into the side. And they build up and then on each other as it

And the leak gets smaller and smaller. Does that make sense? Yeah. No, I was, that's the way I was picturing it. So the, each particle grabs and then another particle grabs another particle and it just kind of snowballs into a bigger, I guess, sealant. It starts from the edges and works its way in. Right. All right. Now my next question would be, what is the biggest size of leak that

you can handle with this? Like, obviously, if you've got a big gaping hole in a duct, it's not going to work. But what about cracks or, you know what I mean? My answer to this question is a little nerdly, but I'll make it practical. So there's a practical limit and a physical limit.

So the practical limit I've heard people use anywhere between three-eighths of an inch to five-eighths of an inch as a practical limit for the dimension of the leak that you're trying to seal. And I've certainly sealed all of those. However, and this is the nerdly answer,

If you look at the efficiency of sealing, it goes with a square of the size of the leak. So to put that in perspective, if you had a one inch hole compared to an eighth inch hole, it's going to take 64 times longer.

to seal the one inch hole compared to the eighth inch hole. Does that make sense? What I'm saying? Sure. Yeah. So practically speaking, if it takes a minute to seal an eighth inch hole, it would take an hour to seal a one inch hole. So basically that's the limit on how big of a leak you can seal. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. So, I mean, where do we attach the machine? Like which end of the, do we go down to the air handler and pull like how,

How does all that happen? Typically, it gets installed near the air handler. Or up to the air handler if it's an attic. So it gets installed at... Well, in new construction, they'll do it before the equipment goes in, right? Just hook it up to the plenum. So turn plenum on the supply plenum or the trunk. But in an existing home, what they do is they cut a hole, put a block in there so it doesn't go back across your coil.

and then pressurize the whole duct system from the equipment on. And same thing on the return side. So if we were thinking sheet metal duct work, you'd go to the equipment. And one of the things I was talking about, like as part of the install process,

What you would do is like when the air handler is out, you'd hook it up and just do it all at that time. Yeah, that makes sense. So I think you answered one of my questions because I was going to ask you about the coil. You don't put a sealant across the coil. Yeah, because that could clog your coil up, right? Correct. Okay. So that means if you've got like a high efficiency furnace, we have to make sure it's not coming in through the bottom where your secondary heat exchanger is too. So basically-

We don't want the aeroseal touching the furnace air handling portion of the system. That's correct. I can tell you that there were dealers who, like, they're going to rip out a piece of equipment. And so they said, well, what the hell? Let's just blow it right across the heat exchanger on a furnace. And I was never there. And no one ever told them they should do this. But it smelled bad for a while. And then it went away. Kind of like burned off.

on the furnace heat exchanger. Okay. But so it's not like, oh my God, you're completely screwed. However, and a coil, you could, it'll tend to like pile up on the face of the coil and not get into all the fins. So you could actually go and clean it up if you had to after the fact. Obviously, that's not what we want people doing, right? But people have, you know, people have made mistakes, I'm sure. It's been done probably at this point in,

hundreds of thousands of houses. So the building science community is a growing community. What are you getting a lot of interest from the building science community? Because building science is all about making sure the envelope and the HVAC system work together. So if we seal those ducts, that is going to help that HVAC system perform a hell of a lot better than what it was prior to that. So what is the building science community's involvement in this? Are they loving this right now?

Or have they been loving it? It's not new news, right? Yes. It's been for a while. So if you'd like, I've been part of the building science community for 40 years. I was a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and I did building science the whole time. And then I did the company for four years, but then I went back. So 10 years, I was not a scientist. Then I became a professor and started a new research center at the University of California.

and wound up, it's called the Western Cooling Efficiency Center, right? So people in there, that's where we actually developed the envelope sealing process. So in the building science world, if you look through the literature, there's a bunch of people who know about it, who've

I mean, I know a lot of them for years, right? I was part of that world. So this morning I was up at two in the morning. There's something called the Air Refiltration and Ventilation Center, which is mostly in Europe, which is why I was up at two in the morning because it was at 11 o'clock in Denmark or something. And that center has been tracking for 40 years

Anything about air flows in buildings. So ventilation rates, leakage of building envelopes, leakage of ducts, what it means, what are the implications? So yeah, I'd say the building science community, I mean, I'm sure there's new people who don't know anything about it, but over the decades, it's been, we've been an integral part of that overall.

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I thought that's what your answer would be. I just know from my standpoint that it seems like the building science community and the comfort, like the HVAC community that is sort of gearing towards the cost

the comfort side of things some of them probably don't know about your product but some of them do and i just wanted to get your take on um how in tune they are with using something like aeroseal to to help a lot of issues within a building well honestly i would say the answer is mixed in that we keep on finding people don't know anything about us that oh somehow they find us so like a

I get more involved, not with residential applications, not to be crude, but it's a little boring. I've been there, done that a million times. It's not about that interest. However, we have things like there was a life sciences research center being built where Candlestick Park was in San Francisco. They knocked down the stadium. They're building all these places and they put in an exhaust shaft for fire safety.

And I find out after the fact, they spent like months and lots and lots of money trying to seal the leaks in that because it couldn't meet the spec. And we went in and in two nights...

We sealed it so that it would pass the spec and work fine. Nice. Okay. So you wind up, there's people who don't know about us. And then the goal of the company, right? We're still not that big, right? The goal of the company is have more people know. And instead of calling us in when it's like, oh my God, our back's against the wall, we're screwed. Make it a part of their normal business practice, right? To go in and seal it that way.

Because it's way more efficient and way easier. Yeah. Okay. So last question is, everything leaks. Everything's got a leak rate. Right. What percentage do we get to of leak rate after aeroseal? Like what percent? So typically the number is wherever we start out, we seal 90% of the leaks that we find. 90%. So we don't go to airtight. To get it to airtight, if you think about it, I can't move the particles through the ducts.

when the duct is perfectly tight. The flow is so low, they fall out on the way there. So in special circumstances, like in a laboratory environment where they really need it to be zero, what you have to do is you have to put pressure relief at the end and then you can get pretty much damn close to zero. But most of the time, you're getting it down to like 1% leakage kind of thing. Certainly three. So typical residential system,

leaks 25% on each side, you seal 90% of it, you probably have 2.5% leakage left after that. Interesting. Okay, perfect. Awesome. So that's sort of the normal practice, but it's not a fact of nature that you can't go lower. It's just a practical cost and need, right? It's diminishing returns. At a certain point, going from 2% leakage to 1% leakage

Doesn't make any difference. All right. So I know you got to run. So let me thank you for this because it was enlightening. I learned some stuff here and I think the product is very cool. Like I've looked into it in the past myself. So, so Mark, thank you very much for this. You're welcome.