An HVAC crash course I can now forget
Like wedding planning, re-modelling a house is one of the best-worst times of my life so far. This week, it’s a good week. We got word today that we will be able to run return vents to the upstairs (read: run central air upstairs) and stay within our budget.
We had been told that there was not space for the duct work required for return vents. Without the return vents, we’d have two options for the second story:
- not very functional central air.
- non-existent central air.
Because of the lack of return vents, we’d be likely have an upstairs that was 8 degrees warmer than the rest of the house year round. Likely, this inability to properly cool the upstairs because hot air has no escape would mean that our air conditioner would overwork itself while running too little to cool the house. Most of the stories I read online suggested that air conditioners run too hard trying to cool the upstairs and then cool the downstairs to the set thermostat temperature and stop. So the upstairs never gets cool and the air conditioner breaks
Our other option of no central air would have meant hotter summers than with the air conditioner and the stories on how cold we’d be in winter range from Mom and Dad’s horror stories of scraping frost off the window as children to the HVAC contractors’ opinions that the gravity vents would work fine and our heating/cooling woes would not be as big of a problem in winter.
Contractors had also told us that the only work around would require adding walls which means unplanned framing and drywalling of three new walls and a loss of floor space. Luckily, our current HVAC contractor can get large enough return vents upstairs to make the whole system work correctly. I guess it pays to work local with someone who has some experience trying to squeeze return vents into old houses.
Hooray, now I can forget everything I know about forced heating.