This video is brought to you by Sportland Quality, Integrity and tradition. So this is a multi-part series. This is me going through and changing the air conditioner in my house. If you haven't seen any of the previous videos, where I do an evaluation explain what's really wrong with my house Where I do blower door tests duck Blaster test determine the infiltration on my house repair a good majority of the infiltration tighten the blower door fix some very common problems that a lot of people do with their homes and the way that they don't realize that their homes work.

We were doing that. So there's a a huge series of videos. We talk about the load calculation that we did. We talk about, um, some of the things that I did to, uh, reduce the air infiltration on my house, sealing up can lights and different things like that.

So anyways, there's a whole series. Uh, definitely want to go back and look at those. There's links in the show notes. There's links popping up in the cards right now.

It'll definitely help you guys to understand where my head space is and why I'm doing this. So let's get on with the video. It is time to start moving through some of this now. I Had originally bought some heartand stamped face grills.

Those were only temporary because we had to get some special order Krueger Bar style uh grills. Um, they're going to be a little tricky to get installed but the goal is less of a pressure drop. uh um less noise. Now these uh with the heart and coolly grills It was already super quiet, but you could hear it so we're hoping that we can quiet it down just a little bit more and reduce the pressure drop.

So again, the other ones were temporary. I Think this is going to be the hardest one to cut in. Um, the stamped grills basically just mounted flesh right? You see that this one? yeah, you've got a and you know it goes in basically. So uh I got to get in here and see what I got to do to make this work.

Currently got some helpers with me today. My family's gone. This one is insane and has more energy than anything ever. She's a nut job and this one is a giant couch hippo that just lays there recently.

Just went to the vet and the vet said yeah, you should probably take him for some more walks and my wife goes well I already take him for one like a walk every day they go. maybe take him for two. he was 80 lbs. Anyways, all right.

um I'm going to go see if I can find some sort of trim solution. Uh, what's happening is the wood behind there is causing this guy to stick out basically a quar of an inch because of the framing on the grill. So I want to see if I can find some sort of a trim option to put behind the return? Grill Walking out to my truck and look at this in my own driveway Pros Heating air conditioning Refrigeration and water heating. it's a it's a good effort you made there, Bud.

But uh yeah, little little off in my own driveway, huh? All right, that's it so you know it's not perfect. Um, over here I got to this a little bit cuz I notched it a little bit too wide, but that's not a big deal. Um yeah, everything's good right there. One thing that sucks is this trim is not level so this is level to the ground.

but you can see like right here it's smaller. but honestly nobody's ever going to see that. CU you're going to be staring from up here so it's not a big deal at all. So like I said I still got to it and paint it but it's freaking awesome.

I'm starting with the commissioning process on the house and what I want to do is we're going to Air Balance all the registers but before I do that I want to do a duct tightness test. So we are going to run a series of tests where we depressurize the Ducks and then pressurize the Ducks to see what kind of leakage they have under different conditions. Um, so right now I'm currently testing at 25 pascals and we are looking to see what the duct leakage is as I depressurize. So it looks like it's slowly ramping down so it looks like we're going to be 38 Cfms of leakage I bet 37 Cfms of leakage under negative pressure so depressurizing the Ducks Um and then we will continue the test and pressurize them and see what it is also I moved everything around and we pressurize the Ducks Now you see, my dogs are just really curious what's going on.

They're all just hanging out right here. So we are running at 25 Pascals right now. It looks like we have about 39 Cfms of leakage and at this point we are going to measure air flow using the true flow grid. So I've drilled some holes right and we're just following a tutorial that they have basically right here.

So we're going to take return duct right and then after the filter and then work our way through the system. Super easy how you just get walked right through the steps. It tells you to move on. so we're ready to take the next measurement after the filter and then next we'll do supply duct up at the top.

Now we're just going to switch over to supply duct and what it's doing is it's grabbing a baseline measurement with the filter in the system and then we're going to put the true flow in in there and it's going to use the pressure drop that the filter normally has to get in. Uh, a more accurate air flow raing. All right. I Fit the true flow in.

there I Was able to take my media filter out by the way too. That's a brand new filter. I Changed it when I started doing the air balancing yesterday. So let's go ahead and uh, let it sit for a second and go ahead and take measurement.

And it's currently taking an airflow measurement right now, working its way through the process And there we go. We have our measurement. So look at that. We are measuring Uh, 108 Cfms.

It's a 2 ton. That's about 509 Cfms per ton. We are running a little bit on the high end. Uh, Interestingly enough.

33 Total external static. That's actually pretty accurate to what the Infinity Control is reading. Let's see right now, the infinity control though, says that we have 850 Cfms of air flow. That's not correct.

but Infinity control saying 38 in of static. So we're a little bit off about .5 on the total external static that the Infinity controls reading. All right. We've got the As Flowfinder here from Retro and it is a powered Flo Hood We are going to go around and we're going to measure every single register and we're going to find out what all the air being supplied to them is uh in a CFM measurement.

And then we're going to go around and we're going to try to balance the system. So when we did the design on the system, we have a an airflow that we're supposed to be delivering out of every register and it's time to do that. So I got my wife here to help me. She's going to take down the numbers when I go around and uh, take these measurements Luke wants to know? Yeah, he's all interested.

What you doing? Your shoes smell real good too. Hm, your shoes smell real good think so 174 So we're going to go with 174 now. it's just a process of going around um and taking the measurements. You can store them in the the gauge if you want I'm not doing that because we're just writing it down.

So we're just going to go around and do every room and then we'll figure out the adjustments that we need to make. All right. after. uh, frustrating my family and everybody freezing them out of the house last night and then same thing today.

Finishing the balancing wasn't the easiest thing for me. so I tried to use the NCI balance method where you find an anchor Grill and then you work from there and while I kind of did a hybrid method because I started using the NCI balance method, but it just wasn't adding up. Um, I was talking to Adam about it. He mentioned it may have something to do with the fact that I'm using more of a Um plenum type setup with uh, flex duct coming off of each one.

um I still did kind of a hybrid using that where you found an anchor Grill But what I found The problem that I found was the idea of that is is you find an anchor Grill the lowest percentage of Uh design airf flow and you don't touch that one and then you find a percentage of Um design airflow discrepancy for every other register and then you adjust those ones and then the Anchor Grill Falls in line. But what I found yesterday and I'm sure it could have been something that I was doing wrong was once I found the Anchor Grill I came out here and I adjusted this Grill first and my Anchor Grill fell in line and then it was like well where do I proceed from there I didn't know so I kind of went in and I looked at all the the register and which ones were over the percentage of design and then I started adjusting those slightly and I got it all to dial in. It's all within line now. So my original design airflow per the design sheet using quick model and energy gauge and everything that Adam designed was 965 Cfms of air.

Okay, couple things on the infinity control. um it doesn't give you the option to dial in that airf flow as perfect as you want it. Okay, you basically have three options. You have economy, you have comfort, and you have Max airf flow.

So I did some math and I found out that on comfort and max airflow Comfort was going to be under my designed airflow of 965 Cfms max airflow overshot design Cfms Yesterday by I think like 985 by 20 Cfms or so and then today I noticed that my total delivered air flow was 1,09 CFM So what I did was I found the original 965 Cfms of air and then I found the percentage of required airflow per register per room and we started looking at percentages. So all that I did was took the 167 Cfms from the front room, divided that by the total 9605s and came up with 177% of the total air flow. So once I figured out the total air flow for every register, then I just went to my delivered air flow 1,9 Cfms and I converted that per room, came up with a percentage per room okay and then adjusted via percentages instead of trying to dial in an exact CFM number because my Cfms that were delivered which I can't really lower that too much more are different than what the design Cfms are. So we were working with percentages if that makes sense.

So by the time I was done, my total percentages were all within line plus or minus 1% actually all plus 1% on a few of them. So we basically have the discrepancies highlighted in yellow those ones were plus one CFM so they're slightly over air flow, but I'm happy with plus 1% Okay, uh, you're splitting hair is trying to get it perfect from there so we are balanced as far as air flow going into every room. The last clip was shot a while ago when I was doing the air balancing that was actually back in November we're now in January it's January 14th and we've been doing really good. Uh We've hit several design days as far as Um equipment goes, we're at 40% 45% capacity right now.

Uh, we have it set to 72. it actually I actually just turned it on because I had it set to 68 as I've been working in the house doing stuff and it was getting kind of warm for me but our normal comfortable temperature what my wife and my family prefers is about 72. but let's step outside and have a look at the condenser outside we are operating I mean again, 45% Capac You can barely even hear this thing moving. Uh, still got a lot of little things to do like I haven't you know? Finished up by sealing up the little joints right there like I need to glue those still I still need to cut off the old line set.

um still need to seal up those penetrations up there. just little things here and there, but this thing is kicking butt as far as heating capacity goes. I'm super stoked no problem. Got my dog over here that she this ball I'm going to go off on a tangent right now.

This ball. she naturally plays with this thing. this is a like a hering ball and she plays with it I Got to watch out though cuz she'll she'll catch it midair. but she sits there and chases this thing all around the yard.

Nobody taught her this. She just instinctually does it cuz she's trying to hurt it. What's up? Luke over here wants to play. He thinks he's missing out.

All right. Well, let's get back to this now that I got distracted so you know this system is operating amazingly. I'm a little disappointed in the lack of airf flow adjustments. I'd really like to be able to dial in the air flow a little bit better.

As far as cooling and heating goes, no problems. We've hit several design days as concerned with heating. uh, below design temperature of 37. It did not budge maintaining 71 72.

No sweat. Uh, we still haven't brought fresh air into the house so that'll be another thing and that will add to the cooling and heating loads. As far as uh, you see, she's out there showing off right now as far as cooling. We had several design days when I started this system up where it ran for the end of September early October well above 97 outside air and it did just fine too.

So I'm super stoked with the sizing. I'm not worried about it again. we're still going to add the fresh air to the house and that's going to add to the load a little bit. But yeah, we're all good and you could see just how quiet this is too.

I mean extremely quiet. Very, very quiet. So I'm super satisfied with everything we do. Like I said, have some changes coming up I'm going to end up redoing some of this condensate line I have some new stuff for that.

Um, still got to air seal this cabinet properly. but I didn't want to do that yet because I'm still going to add a fresh air monitor in here I'm sorry a air quality monitor so I didn't really want to be sealing everything up as of yet. So when I did the duct tightness test though, I did tape everything up so that was sealed then. But yeah, I mean we're doing great.

Like I said, we're eventually going to add fresh air into it and uh oh, the balancing damp or balancing Ducks too we're going to be putting jumper. Ducks Um, and that's another thing I'm going to be doing to try to re, uh, relieve some of the room pressurization issues because we are over pressurizing, especially the master bedroom. So for these rooms down here, I'm going to be putting a return air grill right there which is just going to be a relief uh spot basically where we're going to take flex duct and it's going to dump into the hallway and try to relieve the bedroom pressures. And then we're going to do the same thing for the master bedroom too.

I Think that turned out pretty good. It's been a long process. uh, had to get through the holidays and things got crazy. so I didn't get to finish the video until now.

but we now know that uh, you know we have. What about 37 Cfms of duck leakage at 25 pascals and then I think it was 40 I don't know if I showed the clip in here, but I did measure it at 50 pascals too. and I want to say it was like 45 cfms of leakage or something? Um, there's still some room for improvement. I have a really good idea where the duct leakage is.

Uh, in my master bathroom, there's an existing duct run that I utilized right now with a balancing damper in line up in the attic. And because I use the old duct cuz it's really difficult to get to that area and I plan on doing some remodeling eventually. I Have a really strong feeling that a good majority of my duct leakage is right there on that master bedroom duct and I will be correcting that and dialing in that air duct leakage a little bit more. Maybe we'll even do some smoke tests and stuff in the future to try to eliminate some of that.

Um, as far as the the room pressurization I didn't cover a lot of that in that video but uh, we have I think we're pressurized in the room if I remember right by like 11 or 12 Pascals as it stands right now because we do not have a return path so none of the bedrooms have a return path as of yet for the air that we're delivering into them. So if you have the bedroom door shut and are my system is running and heating or cooling, it's dumping air inside that room. but then eventually it pressurizes to the point that that air can't really move fluidly anymore and so it creates a back pressure and the room pressure ization goes up. We are going to relieve that because my original plan was to use the original Supply grills as a jumper duct into the hallway of the house.

so we we've still got to play with some of that stuff. Um, you know, especially in the master bedroom because we're going to have to I don't know if the original actually I know for a fact that the original Supply Grill is not going to be enough. uh, depressurization for that room, we're probably going to have to cut in another one. Um, and I'll figure that out so that'll come in the future as we address that.

And then also, we still got to bring fresh air into the house. Um I'd like to pressurize the house to a positive pressure slightly is the idea and uh, bring fresh filtered air into the house instead of drawing it in from the walls and the cracks and all that good stuff. So that's kind of where we're at right now. Thanks so much for making it to the end of the video.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Uh, my email is Hvacr Videos Gmail.com Leave me some feedback down in the YouTube comments. let me know what you think, Um, any of the tools that I used in this video, you can pick them up at: TR Tech Tools.com Use my offer code big picture At checkout, you can get an 8% discount on majority of the items on their website. I Get a small commission so that's a great way to help support the channel.

I Do have to say a special thank you to the Energy Conservatory and to Retro te both of them for giving me the opportunity to use their awesome tools to be able to do this testing on my house and dial it in. so that's really awesome. Thank you very much to both of those companies! And here's the really cool thing when I approach the Energy Conserv Atory and Retr Tech they are both direct competitors. When I approached them both I said hey I want to make a video series I Want to use your tools? Would you guys loan them to me? Let me use them I said But the important thing is is that this is not going to be about whose tool is better.

This is going to be about using the tools and showing the tools and what they do. and both of them agreed to that. So that means that even though they're direct competitors, both of them agreed and understood that I was going to be using both sets of their tools. and it was more or less just about me using the you know, the tools and introducing the slightest bit of building science into my channel.

I'm not an expert whatsoever, but it's really awesome to have the support from those two companies um, that have helped me along the way. So thank you again to both of them. Couple other ways to support the channel. If you're interested in doing so, you can go to my website Hvacr Videos.com We have merchandise available on there hats, beanies, sweaters, t-shirts, all that good stuff.

Um, we also, uh, you can support the channel via PayPal Patreon YouTube channel memberships There's links in the show notes of this video stay tuned. There's lots more to come on my house series, but uh I think we're making pretty good progress. My family's getting pretty happy because we've been cleaning stuff out the major constructions done for the most part. so thanks so much for coming along! I Really do appreciate you and uh, we will catch you on the next one.