Let There Be Heat!!!!

(insert pic of thermostat)

OK, this is the story for another blog.

I could go into the background of the contractor/owner relationship with Victor, but for the sake of keeping this blog as short as possible I'll say he quite simply saved my 203K renovation. And I'm very happy with the end product. However, some things were outside of his direct control, and given the many hiccups that came along with this project and the relatively small margin he was getting on it, to a certain extent, he didn't want to bother himself with it. And I understand that from a business standpoint. Lemme get to the point...

A general contractor (GC) on a gut-rehab project like mine is most likely going to hire sub-contractors (subs) to do certain tasks within the overall project. One of the subs he's going to hire is one that specializes in the mechanical (or HVAC--Heating, Ventilating, and Air-Conditioning) aspects of the job. Long story short, I didn't like his mechanical sub. I saw it from the beginning when they started framing the duct work where the ducts come into the house from the outside shed (they put it too low) and in the middle when the put the duct work behind the bathroom mirror instead of the adjacent wall (see If I Could Do This House Over #1 blog) and towards the end when issues with where and how to place the return came up. But it wasn't until the onset of the coldness of Winter '09/'10 that I saw just how much these guys didn't know what they were doing.

Now, the women that had been to my house always complained that it was cold, but I figured this was a women thing cause its been proven that women are more sensitive to cold than men and none of the guys that had been to my house complained it was cold. However, towards the end of December and the beginning of January, I began to see that the thermostat never got about 55 degrees. It was time to get a second opinion. So Mom recommended a guy they use around their house and sure enough, there was an issue with the HVAC...well, 'not technically'. It was an issue with the return duct, it wasn't wide enough to suck air out of the house at a faster rate than what the HVAC was pumping it into the house. This all stems from the fact that the mechanical subs on the renovation used what's called 'flex' duct work

(insert picture of flex duct work)

The diameter on the duct work was too small to adequately handle the air flow being pumped into the house. It gets even smaller when it has to turn a corner. Needless to say I needed larger metal duct work to do the trick. Given the small crawl space under the joists (between 6" and a foot), I needed 8" x 18" duct work.

(insert picture of metal duct work)

However, Mom's guy quoted WAY too much--I don't know if he over-charges Mom and figured I'd be a sucker too or he just didn't want to do the job cause it would have involved a lot of dirty work (i.e. crawling through the crawl space of the house and staying down there while you install it). In any event the second quote (courtesy of a guy that does the HVAC work for Darryl, a contractor friend of mine) was less than a third of what was quote prior so I went with them. Btw, I had other reservations about the first dude cause he said the ceiling fan should spin the wrong way in the winter and summer months (that's another blog too) and he charged me a trip charge of $99 on top of the $129 for an hours worth of labor to diagnose the problem. Maybe he knew he wasn't going to do the project and hit me on the front end.

In any event, dude came by and did it today. Came back around 5pm when he was finished (still a bit skeptical cause while I heard the HVAC pumping air through the vents louder than before (a good thing), it was only through a couple of the vents downstairs. So I put the thermostat up to 80 and went back to work. Got back around like midnight and sure enough, we were at 80!

Back to buck-ed naked time!

Cheers.