Problem Ductwork in Zanesville

When a room in your home never seems to heat or cool properly no matter what you do, the duct system is often the first place to look - and one of the most frequently overlooked. We’ve worked in countless homes where the ductwork, on the surface, appears adequate. But a closer look almost always tells a different story, and the problem frequently starts right at the furnace or air handler itself.

We very commonly find undersized or restrictive ductwork at the point where it connects directly to the equipment - the plenum and the first few feet of supply and return ducting. This creates a bottleneck at the most critical point in the entire system. Think of it like trying to breathe through a straw: your lungs may be perfectly healthy, and the air in the room may be plentiful, but if the pathway is too narrow, you’re never going to get what you need. The same principle applies to your HVAC system. When the equipment can’t move air freely right at the source, every room downstream suffers - but the rooms farthest away suffer most.

The comfort complaints are obvious and familiar: hot and cold spots throughout the home, one room that’s never right regardless of the season, and a system that seems to run constantly without ever quite catching up. But the consequences go well beyond comfort, and this is where undersized ductwork stops being merely inconvenient and starts becoming genuinely expensive.

When a furnace can’t push adequate airflow through the duct system, heat builds up inside the unit rather than moving into your home. The furnace overheats and the high-limit safety switch trips, shutting the system down before it can cause damage - then it restarts, overheats again, and cycles off again. This short-cycling is hard on the equipment, wastes fuel, and leaves your home in a constant swing between too warm near the vents and too cold everywhere else. Over time, the repeated thermal stress of overheating is one of the leading causes of cracked heat exchangers - one of the most serious and costly furnace failures possible. A cracked heat exchanger isn’t just an expensive repair; it’s a safety issue that can allow combustion gases to enter your living space.

On the cooling side, the damage is just as real. When airflow across the indoor evaporator coil is restricted, the coil can’t absorb heat properly and its temperature drops below freezing. Ice forms on the coil, which restricts airflow even further, which causes more ice - a cycle that ends with a completely frozen system and no cooling at all. Restricted airflow also causes refrigerant pressure to drop abnormally low in the system. Technicians who don’t recognize the root cause sometimes respond by adding refrigerant - what many homeowners know as Freon - to bring pressures back up. But adding refrigerant to a system that’s actually suffering from an airflow problem results in an overcharged system, which creates a entirely new set of pressure and temperature problems that can ultimately destroy the compressor. Compressor replacement is one of the most expensive repairs in the HVAC world, often rivaling the cost of replacing the entire outdoor unit.

Across every mode of operation, undersized ductwork forces your equipment to work harder than it was designed to, driving up your energy bills while simultaneously shortening the life of components that should last 15 to 20 years or more. The good news is that this is typically one of the most straightforward issues to correct, particularly during a new installation or system replacement. When the equipment is already disconnected and the area is accessible, addressing undersized supply or return trunks adds relatively little time or cost to the job. Homeowners who take the opportunity to have ductwork evaluated during a replacement often find that it resolves comfort complaints - and prevents equipment failures - they might otherwise have lived with for years. This isn’t a problem unique to Zanesville. We see it consistently across the industry nationwide. Builders and installers working quickly sometimes size ductwork to minimum code rather than optimal performance, and the homeowner pays the price in comfort, efficiency, and repair bills for years afterward.