What’s wrong with that picture? If you can’t tell, click on it and have a closer look…

There is no clearance around the heating ductwork!

There has been quite a few bone head things that we have found around the house since we moved in, but I think that this one takes the cake as the most foolish and potentially dangerous. Unfortunately it is something that our inspector did not pick up on, and something that I was not aware of.

We had a contractor come through to look at possibly doing some work on one of the rooms in our house. He took one look at the cardboard taped around the duct work and told me that I needed to take it off right away, or at least before we fired up the furnace again for winter.

I was told that for safety there needs to be at least two inches (2”) of open space / clearance around the ductwork. For some reason the cardboard in our basement was actually taped to the duct work!

The reason why there needs to be the 2” of clearance around the ductwork is so if there is a catastrophic failure or problem with the furnace and the ductwork heats up dramatically there is a better chance of ductwork not catching the house on fire! The cardboard would provide a perfect fire starter, don’t you think?

Maybe the previous owner had put the cardboard on to prevent noise transfer or something, but I don’t think it’s worth the safety risk, so the cardboard came off tonight…