Before You Heat a Mobile Home This Fall, Do This (Or Pay All Winter)

You push the thermostat over to heat in your mobile home, the blower comes on, and the back bedroom stays cold for one more winter while the gas bill climbs and somebody quotes you twelve hundred to thirty-seven hundred dollars for a new furnace. Buck built mobile homes on a factory line in northern Indiana for twenty-eight years, and he shows you the four joints under the floor where the heat you pay for leaks out before it ever reaches a room. He starts at the gaps around your floor vent collars, then checks for a duct end that was never capped, then a torn crossover on a double-wide, and finally the joint right under the furnace that he sealed himself about a thousand times over. Furnace replacement is not always the answer, and you will learn which leaks a tub of duct mastic and mesh tape will close, which jobs are fair to pay a handyman or heating tech for, and the exact thing to ask a tech for by name. He also explains why your heat tape is the one thing under the home to buy new and never patch, because that one has nothing to do with your bill and everything to do with a fire. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 1:32 How the Duct Works 2:47 Leaky Floor Vents 3:48 The Open Duct End 5:28 The Crossover Duct 6:58 The Furnace Connection SOURCES U.S. Department of Energy — Weatherizing Manufactured Homes (Weatherization Assistance Program guidance) U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission — Heat Tape (Pipe Heating Cable) Fire Hazard Safety Alert Oak Ridge National Laboratory — Duct Leakage and Thermal Performance Testing of Manufactured Homes