Home improvement expert, Danny Lipford, discusses what to consider when installing or replacing the heating and cooling (HVAC) unit in your home.

Video Transcription

Dannylipford.com Danny: Well, as you can the drop close it down which means the work has started to replace the heating and cooling systems in this home. Now, this will make a big difference and the comfort of this family. Now most of the work is taking placing ion changing out old air handler units up in the attic. And that’s where we’ll find our contractor Edward Leatherbury. Boy, you really feel the heat when you start coming up the attic stairs. Edward, I don’t know how your guys can handle this all day long. Edward: And it's almost a 100 degrees up here Danny but we supplemented a little bit with the second system in the house. Danny: Okay, so you’re keeping one system running while you’re replacing the other one, obviously. I guess comfort of the homeowners as well as a little bit of survival up here. Edward: That’s right. It gets to 135 degrees. It's hard to stay in an attic without a little help. Danny: Well you guys are moving a long the way and tell us how we’ve gotten to this point. Some of the things that have taken place over the last day or so. Edward: We started off with an air hailer with hydro heat and then evaporator coil in it with a spatter duck system. A spatter duck system are a bunch of flexible hoses going ion every different direction. They took it out and they’re no putting in the main fiber glass trunk line and if coming off of that will have sheath metal piped with 2-inch rough installation on top of it, they’ll hold up a lot better to the pressures of a variable speed area. Danny: Well, I was surprised that you actually removed all of the duct work. It seemed like it was in good shape and it was a different style that this but why the replacement of everything? Edward: For the comfort level of the homeowner and the distribution of the system, your really ought to have a good system and that’s not really consider that the duck system. Danny: Okay, I see. Now, challenges, I know that at this point you usually find a few things that maybe we’re not anticipated ahead of time or have to run in anything like this. Edward: Yeah Danny, we have the refrigerating lines on the existing system weren’t to the proper size. So this old refrigerating lines run down the wall to under the house and into the slab. We can’t follow the place of the older ones so we have come out with a new route. We are able to run them around the backside here to stay off the deck area and I found a hollow chase from an old fireplace into the house where the condensing is in. Danny: Okay, so you’ll be able to route all of the refrigerant lines from here out to there and as out to the condenser right? Edward: From both systems, correct. Danny: Okay, so you have two separate lines going out? Edward: Right. Danny: Okay, I see that was a bit of a challenge now. We talked earlier about load calculation. How important it is for heating and cooling contractor to really not just as soon that existing size units are big enough but to really provide a load calculation. How exactly does that work? Edward: Well, the load calculations taking to effect that the insolation in the attic, insulation in the exterior walls of the house, the window area and direction that they’re facing which is probably the most important. Whether they’re double pane or single pane in what direction they face.