But I digress... the only reason I mentioned any of that is, I had to return the Dish Receivers and the center part of the dish itself. The instructions said there may (or may not) be a "switch" between the dish and the receiver that needed to be returned too. I did not see this switch on the outside of the house, so, being the fine upstanding citizen I am, I went up into the attic (which in itself was a major task as the access panel to the attic is in a storage closet which is full of stuff that I had to unload) to look for said "switch". I did not find a "switch", but what I DID find was this:
For those not versed in HVAC, this is an air return. The duct in the foreground is SUPPOSED to be attached to that silver box with the hole in it. The theory is, the a/c unit is SUPPOSED to draw air in through the filter that you can see inside the hole. The reality is that the A/C is drawing in unfiltered 120 degree air from the attic. And we wonder why the A/C unit is struggling to keep the house at 76 degrees.
This has apparently been this way for about 2.5 years. Not long after we moved into this house in 2006, we hired a contractor to finish out the upstairs. The whole job was one screw-up after another, but that's a story for another day. Part of the remodel involved replacing one of the 2 Heating/AC units with a larger one. This duct was originally attached to the existing unit, but needed to be re-routed to the new unit which was about 2 feet further away. I'd like to think the HVAC guy just forgot about this one short duct, but for some reason, I think he just didn't really give a shit. The HVAC was done in October, and we were concerned that when summer came, we would be sweltering. Sure enough, we had to call him out a couple of times because some of the rooms weren't getting cool. He came out and did a few things which did help some, but it never did get as cool as we thought it should be. We just figured that's how it is when it gets this hot in Oklahoma.
My in-laws happen to be visiting (Happy Canada Day!!!) and since my father-in-law has a lot more experience at this kind of thing, he helped me get this issue resolved, or more accurately, I helped HIM get this issue resolved. We found some scraps of ducting left over from the remodel and we thought we were all set, until Art tried to tape the new piece onto the end of the exisiting duct. That's when we realized, we needed 16" diameter ducting and the piece we had was 14". So off to the store we went. Of course, you can't find this kind of stuff at Lowe's or Home Depot. We went to a building supply store, who did have it, but only it 25 foot lengths. Another customer suggested using a piece of pipe which comes in 5 foot sections which worked out perfectly. Here's the finished product:
Thanks Art!!! We did wrap the new section in insulation, but I didn't get a picture of that. The next step is probably to have the ducts cleaned. We're debating as to whether to pursue legal action against the joker who was responsible for this mess.
