You pay to heat and cool the air in your house, and duct sealing is the fix when a big share of that air leaks out of the ducts before it ever reaches the room you are sitting in. Novus Mechanical seals and repairs leaky duct systems across Freehold and Monmouth County, using mastic at every joint a duct leakage test flags, the same kind of leak the U.S. Department of Energy says wastes a major share of a home's conditioned air.
Most of the leaking happens where you never look: inside walls, up in the attic, down in the crawlspace. The air slips out through gaps at the joints, bad connections, and seams that were never sealed right. One room stays stuffy. Another never warms up. The system runs longer to make up the difference, and your bill climbs.
The signs are easy to feel. A room that never gets comfortable no matter where you set the thermostat. Bills creeping up for no clear reason. Rooms that go dusty fast. Those all point to duct leaks, but feeling them is not the same as measuring them.
The only way to know for sure is to test. Novus uses duct leakage testing to put a calibrated fan on your duct system and measure exactly how much air it loses, and roughly where. That number is the difference between sealing the real problem and guessing. We measure first, then we fix. No blind quotes.
Here is roughly what the result tells us:
| What the test finds | What it means for your home | What Novus does |
|---|---|---|
| Tight ducts, low leakage | Air loss is not your comfort problem | We look elsewhere: airflow balance or the equipment itself |
| Moderate leakage at a few joints | One or two rooms run behind the rest of the house | Targeted mastic sealing at the joints the test flags |
| Heavy leakage across the system | High bills and rooms that never catch up | Full sealing pass, then a recheck to confirm the fix held |
| Crushed, torn, or disconnected runs | A register with weak or no airflow at all | Repaired or reconnected as part of the same visit |
Novus seals leaky ducts with mastic at every joint the leakage test flags, not a roll of duct tape that dries out and peels off in a hot attic within a couple of years. Here is the process we follow on every sealing visit in Freehold and Monmouth County.
Sealing stops air from leaking out. Optimization makes sure the air that stays in the ducts goes where it should. Those are two different problems, and a duct system can be leak-free and still deliver poorly.
It comes down to sizing and balance. Ducts that are too small choke airflow. Long, twisty runs starve the rooms at the end. Dampers set wrong send too much air to one part of the house and not enough to another. Duct optimization corrects the sizing, the connections, and the balance so every room gets the air it needs.
Novus measures airflow room by room and adjusts the system across Freehold and Monmouth County. If your ducts are part of a bigger reroute or your home needs new runs, that crosses over into ductwork installation, and we will tell you honestly which one your house actually needs.
Sealing is the right fix only when a leakage test says so, not by default. On a Middletown zoning job, previous technicians had already sealed and re-flexed the ductwork more than once, and none of it worked. The house was three to four years old, on a three-zone system with a plenum box and three 10 inch supply runs, one per floor. When a single zone called, the blower's full output was forced down one 10 inch run built to carry a third of that air, and static pressure climbed to 1.2 in. w.c. against a blower rated for about 0.8. That is a sizing problem, not a leak. A duct leakage test is what tells the difference: when the ducts are just too small for how the system is zoned, sealing tighter joints does not touch the real cause. You can read more about how we test before recommending a fix on our how we work page.
Once your ducts are sealed, three things change: the room that never matched the rest of the house holds its temperature, the system stops running all day chasing rooms it could not reach, and your bills drop because the air stays inside the ducts instead of leaking into the attic.
Lower bills follow. When the air you paid for stays inside the ducts, the system works less to keep the house comfortable. The equipment runs shorter cycles and lasts longer because it is not fighting leaks every hour.
Duct sealing also pairs with the bigger picture of how tight your home is. Leaky ducts and a leaky building envelope often show up together, which is why we sometimes pair the duct test with blower door testing to see the whole house at once. Test, seal, verify. That is the order that saves you money instead of wasting it.
We measure your home, explain what we find, and hand you one clear price. Book a consultation in Freehold or Monmouth County.
Updated September 2026 by Novus Mechanical, Freehold, NJ
