While the crew under the house continued to remove the old ductwork, a couple of other Ventwerx guys got to work opening up the walls in various rooms. The new setup meant inverter fan units that reside outside the house and connect via a couple of very small ducts to the units for individual rooms. The ducts run through the crawlspace beneath the house and then up through the walls. Each room unit then also has a drain (as they not only function as heaters but also air conditioners) that either ties into the sewer line or drains to the outside.
Needless to say we ended up with holes in almost every room. The master bedroom started off with a rather small hole, but there was too much stuff in the wall and they couldn’t get the ducting up and in place, so they had to make a bigger opening. The blue room was much easier, as we went with a floor mount just below the windows instead of an overhead unit, so only a hole for the ducts was made and hidden behind the unit itself.
The boys’ space was pretty straightforward, and since we were smart and wanted a unit installed in my office, we could use the same access hole for both–meaning no holes in my office, which is great considering how many holes I patched up when I painted it just a few months prior to this project.
In addition to those four rooms, we also had wall units installed in the guest room, kitchen and Agent Smith’s office. Our original spot in the guest room wouldn’t work, as that is where the return vent for the old forced-air furnace was (first image below). Getting all that metal out of the wall would have been extremely difficult, so we went with the less invasive approach and had the unit installed on another wall.
The unit for the kitchen required no holes, as the crew was able to run the ductwork through the pantry and into the closet where the original furnaces had resided for over fifty years. The same space was used to run the ducts for the unit in Agent Smith’s office, which was originally the garage and where the old furnace closet is. There is no crawlspace beneath the cement pad and the room can get pretty chilly. Prior to this project, Agent Smith got to listen to the rumbling diesel beasts every time they started up to warm the rest of the house. There were no heating duct run to that space, but the heat from one or both furnaces when running was actually enough to keep most of the chill at bay, if you didn’t mind the diesel smell. During our first winter here, the giant mirrored sliding closet doors would bang about every time one or both of the furnaces rumbled to life. We dealt with that and minimized some of the diesel smell by putting felt tape along the inside edges of the front-most door.
Still, once the installation work started, the crew moved along swiftly…