Re: My Big Fat Renovation
Whew, 4 months? Someone's been slacking (or broke?)
I promised the wife if we ever had a kid, I would look into getting our upstairs A/C replaced - the two warmest rooms in the house have always been my computer room and the spare bedroom. I LOVE our downstairs unit, pretty sure I could make an ice rink down there if I wanted to.
The upstairs system has always sucked. Poor air flow, running ALL DAY LONG in summer.
I had the guy that's serviced my systems a few times and been doing all of my friends rentals for 10+ years replace it. Really knows his stuff and fair pricing. The first thing he said was my plenum was built completely wrong (and used squishy pipe instead of hard.) So we replaced the outside unit and attic blower with a 2.5 ton system (was 2.0 before) with a slightly higher fan speed.
With the better fan speed and better plenum (he said with the layout we had, he could only make it better, not totally "fix it")... and wow... it hasn't been super warm yet, but the air comes out of the vents at least 3X better than before. It was pretty warm yesterday and it didn't seem to need to run much at all. June/july will be the real test and we still have the option of increasing the fan speed one more notch if necessary.
He also HIGHLY recommended an attic fan. It was +/-70* the day we installed it and my attic was probably already 90*. I will be adding one before it gets stupid hot. I want to see what this thing is really capable of.
So there went a big chunk of money, just under 6K. He did check Godzilla (our downstairs unit I love) and he's still operating in the near perfect zone.
He also agreed a mini-split would work best for my shop. Rough estimate of 5K for the whole thing. I will likely pull the trigger this fall/winter on that....
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