Hey thanks for watching this video is done by two of the best minds in the industry and you'll comprado and John Cemil hack, neo Caporetto is co-owner of Caporetto comfort solutions in Virginia along with John Cemil hack from think Little John is a excellent and very innovative Designer and the HVAC industry, and they are doing a testing on a new home new construction, home Neal, the install John, the design and so they're doing the test out and they're gon na show you a couple different things: they're gon na be doing a duct leakage Test to show how tight you can make a duct system and why that's important they're also going to be showing a really innovative design that they have, and that is to use in the RV in order to exhaust air from the bathrooms and, at the same time, Bring in ventilation air in order to create balanced ventilation, but it's rather than doing that with traditional bath fans. You're doing that through an ERV which exchanges that heat and moisture from the outgoing Airstream to the new in going Airstream. I think it's a brilliant way of doing it. One thing I want you to notice here is: they are using some materials that traditionally technicians might poopoo like flex duct, and I like it, because what they're doing is they're showing that you don't have to go crazy with using very expensive and time-consuming materials.

It does come down to the way that you install it. That's what matters more and by the time they get done with their testing. You really can't dispute the results and that's what I like about them. Not only do they design systems that are practical and that do the job that they're supposed to do, but they are testing them on the way out.

So I hope you enjoy. Thank you, Neil comprado and John Cemil hat. Take it away guys, let's take a look at the plans. What we have is a 3,000 square foot house, it's single-story.

It has a condition crawlspace where the equipment is and a conditioned attic, it's being served by two ducted one-ton mini-split heat pumps. As you can see, the duct system is pretty simple: the supply is in blue, we have a short plenum and then branch lines run out to each of the register boots. These are done mostly in Flex. All turns are in rigid, but straight lines and flex.

We have a central return for each system and then we have undercut doorways to provide a return, air path back to the equipment, and this shows the ERV, which is how we are ventilating this house. It is a completely independent, duct system. The green represents the fresh air, so we have fresh air going to each of the bedrooms as well as fresh air coming from outside, and the yellow is the exhaust duct which each bathroom is being exhausted and also the kitchen which is not shown on here. This is designed to run 24/7, so we are constantly providing fresh air to the living space, as well as removing stale air from the bathrooms just to start out so we're doing a duct leakage test gone ahead and taped off all the grills.

Are we pressurizing? We are pressurizing, okay, we're we're uh, we're pressurizing, the duct system, gon na attempt to do ring, for you have the ring four on the duct blaster, which is a little bit of a different process than usual, where we would depressurize the system - and this would give Us a direct read, oh so this blue line right here is actually inserted into one of the supply registers. So what we are doing is differential pressure. Gage has two channels so channel a my left side is measuring the pressure in the ducts, which is the blue, hose with respect to the room pressure, and then the right side is measuring the pressure difference across the fan. Opening there's a hose connected to be not connected to the family, something right now we're honoring for the rain, for almost nobody in the world gets to use ring for because this is only for measuring duct leakage under 10 CFM.

So we're hoping we get there. We don't know yet it's gon na be close. If you don't get it, I'm going to blame the equipment already there we're there yeah cuz, I tested it on rain three, oh man! No, you tricked me so I've got the gauge set up now to do 10 seconds rolling averages and we try to get the duct pressure as close as we can to exactly 25 Pascal's with respect to the house, really aren't to get it perfect. So the pressure drop across the opening is 42, which gives us a reading somewhere between six point, eight and seven point two cubic feet per minute: not bad I'll.

Take it so we'll just just mark that up here, for you pretty tight, that's it for this one! For this one gecko all right, we have one more test, so we're on the second heat pump system for this house and we're still on bring for Doug tightness testing kit at 25. Pascal's we're reading 18 point to 18 point to kind of scale is a pressure difference which gives us about four point: six CFM a little less than five. Let's call it that's a our best yet so I'm happy with that and just to be clear. This is actual duct system this this portion is it roughly covering 1500 square feet, it's a one ton unit.

So there is a six eight flies return. It's not just we're, not cheating, it is a duct system. So this is our ERV right here. This is handling the ventilation for the whole house.

It's ventilating, the kitchen which has a recirculating hood and all the bathrooms and we're delivering fresh air to all the living space to the bedrooms and the living room. Erv stands for an earlier construction site. So this is the renewing Evy 90p. We like to renew our units quite a bit for their combination of price simplicity and performance, very easy to work on, which is nice.

We have Merv a filtration here. This is the energy recovery core, and what we're going to be doing now is balancing the airflow between the outside air stream and the exhaust Airstream, and what the manufacturer has done is put in pressure ports to measure the pressure drop across the core and they provided Provide it to calculate the airflow at different pressure, drops so we're gon na. Let these fan motors get up to speed and go ahead and measure, and some of the things that nail is gon na be specified. We have vibration, isolation material.

Here we have these pretty sexy silencers from fan tech that do a great job, reducing airflow noise that gets delivered to the rooms. We've done some put some flex down in place just to isolate your equipment. The Ducks is the Ducks are attached to the structure. So you know we do the best we can to minimize noise and vibration.

We also ran some flex ducts, so we have essentially the exhaust and the fresh air. There are metal trunk lines and then we have flex duct, run outs from there to again to quiet it down, and so so what we're doing now with the manometer is we're measuring or our outside air, our supplier stream measuring across the core, the pressure drop and This is the supply side is moving just a little bit less there. So this is a very simple ERV single speed motors, no fan motor adjustment. With this setup, there's no controls it's just on or off.

So what we do is we adjust the air flow with dampers, so we figure out which air stream is lower? Okay. So now what we're going to do is measure the airflow and the two air streams, the outside air and the exhaust air stream, and then we're going to balance the air flows as close as we can try to get them perfect if we can. So this is a very simple machine: just single speed motors, no individual fan motor adjustment. So the way that we balance this is we figure out which side is lower air flow, and then we use the dampers to restrict the high side a little bit and bring that air flow down in line with the lower side.

So right now we're measuring the air flow on the outside air stream and we're at 0.1 9 and change and says a wallet water column and then we're going to go that we have already tested this out and we know that that is the lower side. So I'm just gon na reset this gauge and see where we are on the exhaust side. I've got a 10 second average here, okay, so we're at point two one basically or about 10 CFM off in terms of the balance damper. Here we get down one-nine-five range, so John you're setting us up as balanced airflow the exhaust and the fresh air will be equal.

That's right! So there some people do it differently. This could be set up to provide positive pressure or negative pressure as well. So the balanced positive most of the time we do it balanced. Sometimes we do it positive right.

We have an upcoming project that has a wood stove and that one will set up the ERV to be slightly positive in order to encourage draft up the flue and lessen the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. This house doesn't have that, though, so we're just going to try and set it up as close as we can to balance all right. One night, seven, just water column, our supply son, one night for good shape. So now what we have to do is go to the individual rooms.

You know, folks, the design certain rooms have different airflow values and adjust them, and then once we do that we'll come back here to see if we've messed up the total flow actually means a little bit of tweaking. This first step is to get the right. You know the right, total amount of airflow and then go adjust the individual rooms and then we'll go back and do that again and then we'll go back and do this again and some time tomorrow, we'll be done just kidding all right. So we've made some adjustments balancing this zone if this is a one time, ducted mini-split, so the available static pressure is less than a conventional unit and this particular fly is about 35 feet of 6-inch round flex duct and we have we're at 92 CFM.

So let me just so: we all heard that correctly ducted mini-split 35 feet of flex, 92 CFM and it's quiet every system. The process is slightly different on these. They have 10 fan speeds. Okay, so we have its target CFM on this one ton unit it's 300.

Okay, so we're starting at the lowest fan, speed, we're gon na go around measure all the supply ducts and then add that up and see where we're at so that's kind of like the first step of air balancing. Is you want to get the fan speed set correctly? Every unit is a little bit different in that process, but then we will go around and measure all the supplies. This is the Aysen flow. Finder power flow hood and if you see we use supply registers with opposable blade dampers in them, so we can make adjustments on the spot.

So you just want to get this thing kind of up to speed come around this way. West Vica see what it's doing now is it's compensating for the pressure drop, so it's trying to basically create a neutral pressure, so the flow code itself isn't opposing any resistance on the the airflow which so we're measuring 71. So that's kind of where the accuracy it comes from a you know, a really nice manometer and the the pressure, the powered. What's the target 75.

Okay, all right so both of my hand, honor and John's hand. Ometer - have come up with a reading of 43 CFM. So, let's, let's see how accurate I mean I have calibrated mine, it's been a little while, since calibration we're guessing 43 dodge, it's got, I've got to take it back to the shop 28 to so. This is one of the drawbacks of installing supplies in attics.

I'm glad you video we're good the initial round and our airflow is a little bit low of our target. So we're going to John's increasing the fan tap from 0 to 1. Then we'll go back around and measure again and then hopefully that's it. Maybe one more time: okay, so full disclosure.

This is round 3 of going around, and balancing stake was the first time we went around. You know usually we'll find a zone or room that has low airflow and we'll adjust the damper first yeah we're back down to speed, tab, zero and we're at 304 CFM our targets 300. So we're gon na call that one good we're here in the world's nicest crawl space, the only thing that could make it any better if it was higher, but it's a got, a rat slab. It's it's insulated! It's clean! It's a pretty much a pleasure to work in this, so I just wanted to show you the unit.

This is the one unit we have set up for 400 CFM. This is a ducted mini-split, and so we had about four and a half CFM of duct leakage. Part of some some ways of doing that is you got to seal the cabinet? Okay, you know we have our filter up top in theory, there's no real access to this. The coil goes like basically right here, fans here, so the fan is on the warm side.

Okay, so the fan doesn't really get any growth in it. The coil is pretty much inaccessible anyway, so we just go ahead and we tape it all up. I have to get back in here at some point in time. You know I do the electrical panel and foil tape, it's a little bit easier to deal with the pneumatic tape, and then we tape up all these penetrations.

You know like even like on the copper. We tape it up and we try to squeeze every CFM of a out of it stretch. Tape is awesome, so look I get five CFM total leakage and we use a canvas connector because of the way we make them. They pretty much don't leak at all.

So pretty happy with how this turned out another cool thing, if you want to look down that way, that this duct right here is a six inch round 35 feet of flex duct and we're getting 90 CFM on a duct if any split, so that the way This system is laid out, is we essentially have a plenum? We have a supply plenum and then we have a whole bunch of flex ducts running off it. The trick is that the flex ducts are pulled tight. They are not turning wherever we make a turn. We use hard pipe elbows things like that, so we're able to take a ducted mini-split and run a whole bunch of flex on it and deliver required air flow fully.

That gives you guys some confidence to run some flex. John told me a little bit about this high-performance filter grill. You have here yeah, so high performance filter grills, especially for new construction. This is our preference.

So for this one ton heat pump system, we have a single central filter grill for the whole system. This one's twenty by twenty and one of the keys is that it's a little bit oversized compared to typical practice and it's a two inch deep filter grill, so that we can use a two inch deep, merv 13 filter to get excellent filtration with really really low Pressure drop so at 400 CFM. The pressure drop across this filter is, in the point, zero. Five two point: zero six inches of water column range, so we've got that Merv.

Thirteen filter we've got the filter. Grill itself is sealed to the ductwork. So we have zero bypass, so all of the air has to go through the filter and we've got a gasket through the filter to rest against. So we've on all the air going through the filter and getting all the fine part out, keeping our returned up clean.

Keeping our coil and blowers clean, keeping our supply duct clean. We got clean air going to the bedrooms. Okay, so we've got here. Rheem heat pump, water heater: this is their newest model.

That's been out on the market for a couple of years, now, ultra efficient and much much quieter than past models. The people have water heaters and what we're doing with this is we got intake air comes in through the top goes through a filter, and then discharge air comes out the backside around the side of this unit, which I have not ducted. Yet we will finish that in just a little bit we're in a relatively small equipment room, that's on the main floor of this house and so we're taking the discharge air and sending it down to the crawlspace for good mixing of air in the crawl space and To keep this space warm and eliminate any comfort issues from that cool discharge air. So why do you specify a heat pump? Water heater, keep water heater for best, combination of efficiency, low cost of operation and safety got it and it helps dehumidifier Chinn central virginia.

We have the need for short yeah another little icing on the cake, big thanks to john and neil for making this video it's time consuming to make videos it gets in the way of the project, but they do it honestly to be able to share with you. So that you can get some ideas, I think they would be the first to tell you that it isn't necessarily that you need to do everything the way that they do it, but seeing the way that other people do, it is really helpful. We've learned a lot from John and Neil over the years, and I can't thank those guys enough. Alright, thanks for watching we'll see you in the next one.