We called him out here because there's been an intermittent banging sound from the ducts. The lying machine said it might be our Too Thick Filter (seems like it should be illegal for like every hvac filter ever made to be too much for residential hvac despite being marketed for such, but hey) but even with a thin ass "is this even a filter" filter it was still doing it
Well tl;dr our ductwork is a hack job that looks like it was installed by a total amateur. There's all these spots with circular plates screwed into the ducts and they're not even sealed with tape or anything. And i guess the return duct is just too small so it's just constantly building up this huge negative pressure.
So that's why our humidity is fucked, it's just constantly sucking in air from the crawl space
We haven't seen a real quote yet but he's basically like "it'll probably be around 16000 dollars" because the A/C unit is like 10 years old so if we're replacing the ducts we might as well replace everything. That's a lot of money
I guess we don't need to do anything TODAY because it still WORKS but it's basically a ticking time bomb that will totally wipe out all of my partner's savings. It could be worse because we could just not have savings to pay for anything but it still fucking sucks and is very stressful especially when I still need to get a new car at some point (because we have one working vehicle)
It really feels like life is a constant stream of go fuck yourself sometimes
P.s. he replaced the P trap but I'm really confused because he says it's not draining at all and i literally saw it draining before
They make ductless units now that essentially function like window units but are more sleek and meant to be "permanent" (however long they last). They're fairly inexpensive and many of those units now days are highly efficient as you mentioned. You can even get multiples and tie them together (I think there's some proprietary thermostat unit or something) to act like a central unit. I've never used them, but I did look into them years back when I was faced with the same decision. I was extremely tempted to go that route. I was gonna use three in my upstairs area and the basement solves itself (it stays reasonable even when the temp outside is horrible). Maybe next time.