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
He did show me a bunch of pictures of ducts with metal plates screwed on with huge gaps so I think there are actually numerous issues with the duct work. that could all maybe just be covered with tape, though. The return duct seems like a bigger issue since it's causing the pressure drop that's causing the ducts to bang
I guess the thing to do right now is just wait and see on the actual A/C unit (and hope it doesn't shit out in the winter, it's a packaged gas unit that does the heat too) and maybe try to get the ductwork replaced when we can (since regardless of the A/C system all the gaps and stuff are going to be increasing energy bills)
A bucket of mastic and a couple of big shitty paint brushes solves any gaps
Get you some of that aluminum tape and the ducts will be fine