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
my current interpretation is that it's just that the ductwork is all fucked (the gaps in various bits of bolted on sheet metal, plus the return) and that that's just generally not good for the various components of it, so there's just a greatly increased chance of Something Going Wrong because of it
It really does seem really janky. He showed us a bunch of pictures but I don't have access to them at the moment. If we can get them sent to us (or if I can be brave enough to go into the spiderhole known as the crawl space) I'll post them.
But yeah it might be possible to tape over all the gaps and then maybe just pay for a larger return duct. I dunno.
The guy seemed alright but along the lines of what you're saying here, he said the company wouldn't give us anything for the old gaspack unit? Which seems weird, since he also said we "could probably list it on Facebook marketplace for 2-3k and sell it in a day"
I think right now we're just going to collect quotes on how much it would cost to do all this and then uhhh I guess let it ride until there's a more serious issue with the actual gaspack unit, since it's still working, cooling, etc.
Not sure if I’m missing something, but the biggest “going wrong” would be a total loss of the AC unit right? So instead of hedging risk and upgrading it, couldn’t you try a quick fix and see what happens? I bet some contractor could do it for way, way less, like a day of work + supplies and a new return duct. Spend a lot less now and realistically I bet you could get a few more years out of it. I’m not an expert by any means, but this is what I’d do if I didn’t have the cash lying around for a full upgrade. It’s basically a matter of risking ~$2k to maybe need a full replacement anyways, or paying the full cost up front. I’d get a second opinion and push them to say the actual likelihood of a failure with the patch job.