– So, what the heck is this thing, and can it really increase
your A/C's airflow by an average of 40%? We're gonna find out with this thing. ♪ Hey ♪
(upbeat music) ♪ Hey ♪ – I first saw this product
on Facebook a few months ago, and it looked really interesting. And then, recently, I
was in Elkhart, Indiana, doing some training at Grand Design, and our trainer showed us
one and demoed it a bit and I was intrigued. – Yeah, it looked so cool that we reached out
directly to the company to see if they would be
interested in partnering with us and letting us try it on our own A/Cs. – Mm-hmm, so they did send
us some evaluation units. Thank you very much for that. And we put them to the test. – [Tara] What we're talking about is a product called RV Airflow. – Right, and per usual, we're under no obligation to
give them a positive review. We're just giving it to try
it out and see if we like it.
– But for this video, you don't have to just
take our word for it. We're gonna prove it to you with numbers. – That's right. We have numbers on a spreadsheet with some actual performance improvements, and they're pretty exciting numbers. We're not gonna go into
the step-by-step install, because, quite honestly,
it's not that difficult. – Yeah, and they actually
already did an install video, so we're off the hook for that. We will put a link for
their install video, though, in the description below
and in the blog post.
– Right, as well as the
written instructions that you'll get with the unit. Our focus is gonna be
on the actual numbers and how it improves it, but we are gonna talk about some tips on the installation, too.
so we'll get to that. Before we jump into the product
and how it actually works, I wanna talk a little bit
about the stock A/C system, how it works, and how this
product improves that air flow. So, we're gonna go up
into the front of the RV, where we're actually close to an A/C. If you watched our A/C maintenance
video we did last year, you know that RV or any A/C performance is largely based around airflow. In that video, we talked
about how to improve airflow on the top and the unit itself, as well as what kind of
maintenance to perform up there, so if you haven't seen that video, be sure to go check that out. Today, we're gonna be talking
about everything below that in the airflow system inside the RV.
Your A/C system, because it's so compact, is divided into two halves, the high side, where the
A/C actually comes out, and the low side, low pressure
side, that sucks air in. All of that happens right here inside this box called a plenum. In your stock system, the high side and low side
are divided by a divider that goes right across here, and then a splash plate
that goes on the bottom.
Let's talk a little bit
about the inefficiencies inherent with the low side. If you've looked at your
cover plate and filters, I just put these back in for effect. You've got these giant areas
here for filters, right? But the way the stock system is designed, when it's all put together with
that divider in the middle, you're cutting this right about here and you're only using about a third of each of those big filter areas. Speaking of filters, if you have taken as much as a slight look
at your stock filters, you know they're not MERV
rated or really that efficient. We use these filters. They're not washable, unfortunately, but they're MERV 6 rated,
which isn't super high, but it's better than stock. And these are RVAir. They're not related to RV Airflow at all, but we will have links
for these down below if you're wondering what
kind of filters that we use. Let's talk a little bit
about the high side. The high side starts
right here with this hole.
If you look up here, you can see the fan and all of the air that
comes out of your A/C, be it conditioned warm or cold, depending on how you're using
it, comes out of this hole. It comes into the plenum, and then either goes into the
ducts, which we'll get to, or it can go to your dumps. Your dumps are these
little things right here. A couple of problems
with using these dumps, first of all, you'll see
that it's gotta go down this narrow channel right
here to get to these dumps. It's not a super wide channel, and that by itself, is inefficient. Additionally, these dumps
are right next to the intake, so a lot of the air that gets
pushed out of these dumps goes right back in and short circuits it, wasting that energy. It's much more efficient
if you can find a way to get your conditioned
air into your ducts and out to your RV better, and that's what RV Airflow does. A little note on that, because it's making best use
of getting it to your ducts, it completely disables these dumps, and you'll see that once
we get this thing put in and I show it to you.
Let's talk a little bit about those ducts and how they work with this stock system. When you have the stock setup, you've got a divider in here, and this entire box right
here just gets pressurized and then goes out the ducts. So, the system itself has a
lot of opportunities for leaks. Number one, this whole
section here is pressurized, and you can see these little
vents here aren't super sealed. Air is gonna leak out of those and go right back into your system. Additionally, any deficiencies
you have up in here that we talked a little bit about in our A/C maintenance video, leaks can happen into your attic. They can go short circuit
back over to the other side. If you're like us and your separator kind of fell over a little bit, because of that pressure in this box, it just pushed that thing over. – [Tara] Oh, yeah, wait. I want to say we did our last
A/C maintenance a year ago, and our point that you
need to check it annually was proven when you open
it up in the living room, the main A/C, and what was the thing? – [Chad] The divider.
– The divider was pushed over and there were other things
that you needed to fix. And that was with a year of traveling. I think stuff just gets jostled around, so we were losing a lot of… – A whole bunch.
– Yeah. – Yeah, and you're gonna
see that in our numbers. You're gonna notice when we get to it that we actually tested
twice because of that. The high side just pressurizes this box and tries to force air into the ducts. It's a very leaky system, potentially, and it's not the most efficient
as far as getting the air from that narrow channel to the ducts. It's just a box and it's
very turbulent and messy and not super efficient. And again, that's where
RV Airflow comes in.
We've talked a lot about it. Let's show it to you. Let's talk about what this
RV Airflow system does. – Here, you can watch
from your silk pillow. So, RV Airflow, what the heck
does it look like, right? – What is this magical thing? – This magical box right here. And this thing is cool
because it was invented by RVers for RVers, and
Richard invented this, right? And he did it because his
wife was uncomfortable. – Yeah. He's got like 30 years or
something like that in engineering and a little bit of that in HVA/C, and he invented this for her. – Because you know. – Happy wife, happy life. (laughs) – Although it may look like
just a plain old foam box, it's not.
– Yeah. It's actually three-pound
expanded polystyrene or something like that, EPS. It's really, really high density, so it's not gonna flake. It's not like the packaging you get wrapping your monitor in an Amazon box. – You can really tell the difference when you feel it in person. – Mm-hmm, and just so you know, this device has been tested
and approved by Coleman to not void your warranty.
It will not void your warranty. – That's right, and it also
has a lifetime guarantee, which is awesome. So, keep watching til the end, because we have a
discount code for 10% off, and it'll also be in the description. – Right. So, once you get this
thing out and look at it, it becomes kind of obvious
how this thing works. This replaces your splash
plate and separator, and does it all in one, but it does it with super high efficiency. This little seal here is designed to go right up against that A/C output, right against your high side,
so your fan is right here and then it blows the
air right down this hole. The conditioned air is split and sent off to the vents on
both sides, to your ducts. And it does that through these inserts.
These are designed to go inside your ducts and then be sealed on the side and be pressed right up against here so that there's no break,
there's no gap in airflow from your high side right
into your ducting system. Additionally, the low side, boom, you'll notice that this
has a nice curve to it. If you remember, when we were talking
about the stock system, is the third of that filter
area was your intake. This expands that area, because your low side
is gonna sit right here. Your low side is gonna sit right here, and then this curve here
opens up that entire bottom of your A/C for intake.
So, this greatly improves
both the high and low side all at once. – Not all RV A/CS are the same, right? – A lot of RVs use the same A/C unit, so they can cover a lot of RVs. If you're not sure, go online. We'll put a link below. They do have a list of compatible RVs that they have tested and
compatible A/C systems. They also have a whole section on how to measure your plenum to see if one of these will work for you. So, you can make sure that
it's gonna fit and everything before you actually get it in there.
This thing is really not
difficult at all to install. I do, however, have some
tips that I've found with our A/C systems, doing our three, and after I show you that,
we'll get to our numbers. – But before we do that,
please hit the like button. Don't forget to subscribe
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where you can find blog posts and other content that you're
not gonna find on YouTube.
– Right. And also, you can
subscribe on our website. If you're not a YouTube
subscriber kind of person, go there and subscribe. – Yeah. – Like we mentioned before, we will link an installation video below, as well as a will this fit my
RV checklist and measurements, so be sure to check those out. Pretty simple installation. You remove the filters,
you remove the cover, you remove the splash plate
that's underneath that, along with the divider, and
you're left with this box, which is your plenum. The first step is to just
kind of clean it up in here.
Get rid of any loose tape, any stuff not looking good in here. Basically, you just wanna clean this up. Don't worry too much about like taping off the edges and things. Just get any old tape out of there. You'll also want to
neaten up the duct area. If you're like ours or a lot of RVs, you might find there's actually tape covering part of the
ducts, so clean that up, because these duct inserts are
gonna go right inside there. You also wanna check the
centering of your A/C. It should be pretty close
or else your lag bolts wouldn't have fit in there to begin with.
But the idea here with this thing is, you'll notice this as
right up against the edge and you kind of want it
to look that way in here. And if you think about how
this is gonna line up in here, you just want to make
sure that your high side, your exhaust port here, isn't so far back that
half of it's over your roof or that it's too far forward. You wanna think about how this
is gonna line up right here and have that high side be
right on the edge there. Additionally, if you look at
where your lag bolt holes are, you're gonna notice those lag bolts are gonna be going through these holes.
So, they're about, you know, a half to one inch from the corners. And the thing is, since
you've taken this bottom plate and lag bolt off, if you need to recenter or move your A/C little bit, you can just lift right up on it and push it around a little bit. I had to move our center A/C forward about a quarter of an
inch, and it fit perfectly. The next thing you're gonna wanna check, along with making sure that
the ducts are clean of any tape so that the inserts can go in, is how they're positioned
inside the plenum. You'll notice that these
inserts are flat on one side, and that flat side is designed to go against that backside of that plenum. You wanna just make sure
that you have access to the full length of each duct.
That way, this can fit in there. – Wasn't one of ours like not quite? – Yeah, all of ours were good, except for one side of our middle A/C. Our middle A/C had one of the ducts that was just a little
bit too far forward, so part of the duct was behind the plenum, or just outside the plenum. The ducts are a little bit that way. It kinda goes in here, so hopefully that duct
insert will fit in there. On this side, it's a little bit better. I can't move the duct, so all I could really do
was adapt one of these by cutting off these little edges here so that I could tuck it
in there and pop it in. But you wanna get all
that work done up front and know that your duct
inserts actually insert.
I found that it's simplest
to reach right through here and just push on the ducting a little bit to get it to stick inside. Once you've got those lined up, you can take off the adhesive
backing and put them in there. You will notice that,
because of the foam here, it does stick out from the side
of the plenum a little bit, and that's by design. You want it to have a
little bit of pressure pushing up against these holes
here to make a good seal, to get that good airflow.
I'm gonna put this back in so we can show you the main dealio. You wanna feel around inside
all four sides of this and make sure that the duct
insert is actually inserted. From there, it's just a matter of putting in the RV Airflow system. You'll kind of wanna
do one side at a time. Maybe you have to reach up in here and push the vent things aside. And it should kind of go
up in there just like that with those two things pushing against it. And then, probably the most
difficult part of this, which isn't that difficult, is getting these lag bolts to line up. What I did was I would get the thing lined up like this ahead of time. You may have to rock it back and forth. You may need to get a flashlight and kind of shine it up in there to make sure your holes are aligned. And then, once you do that,
you'll pull them back out and basically put your bottom mount plate through those holes.
This part should be pushing right up against the Airflow system. That lines up perfect. I know that hole's good. That lines up good. (gentle music) Feed that in. I'm gonna feed in this
other side, just to hold it. You'll definitely want
something like this, because these lag bolts
are a ton of turns. You'll see here what I mean. (drill whirs) Imagine doing that by hand. – You wanna get these things torqued to about 40 to 50 inch pounds. I used our little impact driver here and I didn't really crank on it, 'cause I wasn't sure how much that was, but I was quite surprised when I went back to re-tighten with the torque wrench, they still needed quite a bit of turn.
So, it needs to be
snugged down quite a bit. If you saw our tools video, you know that I like having the right tool for the right job. This is no different, but you could kind of
guesstimate it and crank it down. You'll probably want to
get an actual torque wrench capable of measurements in
that 50-inch pound range. Always zero out your torque
wrenches when you store 'em, or whatever the manufacturer recommends. Some of them have a poundage. I'm gonna set this just above 45, right around 47 pounds. We'll have a link for
this down below also. You can see it's still
taking quite a few more turns to actually get to the
break point for the torque than what I got on my impact driver. I could've cranked it down more, but I'd rather get the last
few pounds with a tool. And you wanna do a, kind of a diamond pattern, because after you torque one down, the other one might lose torque. So, you wanna keep going
around until they all click. You can hear it pushing up on that foam. Nice. So, we got that.
Now, I'll go back here. And you notice it's taking
quite a few more turns now that I've torqued the other sides. Torqued. So, that's the main install. You don't put the splash plate back on. You don't put the divider back in. Just save those for later, in case you want to take
your RV Air to your new RV, but this goes back on
just like it was before. While I've got this on here, you can kind of see what I mean. Before, the intake was just right here, and now it's been expanded
out to this entire system. So, another quick tip along the note of this entire bottom
now being your low side, do not leave these
vents open, because now, that's just an unfiltered
entry into your system.
Put your filters and stuff back in. And that's it. So, let's talk about our
results, because you know, they claim a 40% on average
increase in performance. Now, my original plan, I
took our anemometer here, which measures wind speed and throughput, and I built this little adapter for it so that it fits snugly up into our vents. That way, we're capturing
all the air from each vent and I can stick it in there,
take my hands off of it, and just have it be the
same on every event. My plan was to measure all eight vents with just the middle A/C on, measure all eight vents
with all three A/CS on before installing anything
to get a baseline. So, those are the numbers you'll see. We'll have all these numbers and readings posted in our blog, so be sure to go there if you want to see the actual spreadsheets – [Tara] We actually ended
up taking two baselines. – Right, one with just the middle A/C, and then one with all three A/Cs, because I think Grand
Design is installing these in a lot of their new RVs, but they're only doing
it on the middle A/C.
So we kind of wanted to get a feel for what kind of performance
we would get out of just that versus all three.
– Yeah, but we're not completely sure which models and what they're doing
with the RV Airflow. Just check and find out. – Yeah, if you're having a system built, check with your dealer and see if they're putting those in or not. So, we did that, we got
all of our baselines, and then I installed it,
and then I ran another test with just the middle A/C. I took our anemometer
that I've had for a while, just because I like to test things. You might've seen this when we put little vent
nubbies in our A/C. A little bit of Gorilla tape here and some insulation around the sides so it fits in there nice and snug, and this should give us pretty
good, accurate measurements.
Kitchen port, 1.17. And we immediately noticed we have way too big of a number. We had 148%, almost 149% increase, and the reason is because our little divider had fallen over. We were starting from a
deficiency versus a normal system. – [Tara] This goes back to earlier, when I said make sure you run
your A/C maintenance protocol at least every year, if
not maybe twice a year, because ours has been a year and we clearly needed to make
some adjustments up there. – Yeah, and you know, all you have to do to be able to see if that's falling over or not is just pull your filters out, and you can see right into the low side, and if it's tipped
over, push it back over. I thought ours had
plenty of force in there to keep it in place, but
over the course of a year, all the pressure in that
high side of the plenum just pushed it over.
So, 148% increase from
where we started, though. That's pretty freaking cool, even though a lot of that can
be attributed to the thing. So, our numbers were
skewed right off the bat. So, what I did was I took
two more sets of measurements with the front A/C by itself
and the rear A/C by itself, and measured just those vents, got new baselines for
those and new measurements. And, dun da da, for the front A/C, we came up with a performance
improvement of 39%, and for the rear A/C, we had 56%. You sum all the numbers together and you get the difference of 45% overall between the two front and rear A/Cs. That's right on par
with what they're saying of 40% on average. They're not saying up to
40% in an ideal situation, they're saying, out of
the tests they've done, 40% is the average, which
is really pretty cool. So, the numbers are
super, super impressive, but what about real-world applicability? It's getting chilly, so we weren't able to really
get a feel for the A/Cs.
However, because our middle
A/C is also a heat pump, it's the same air flow whether you're talking
about heating or cooling. Now, under pre-RV Airflow circumstances, whenever the temperature
would get into the forties, the furnace would kick in. The way our system is designed
is the heat pump is on, and if the temperature
differential gets too big between the set temperature
and the measured temperature, the system knows that the
heat pump is not keeping up and kicks on the furnace. Now, though, that didn't come
on at all in the forties, and it wasn't until it
got into the thirties that it had to use the
supplemental heat of the furnace. So, we can immediately
see that we're getting a bit of an increase in our heat ability using the RV Airflow system. – Which I really like. – So, we're super stoked about the numbers that we're getting here, as
well as the real world benefits we're seeing already from this thing.
– Definitely. If you guys wanna check
this out for yourselves, don't forget that we
have a 10% discount code in the description below, and it will be in the blog post, too. – As well as, of course, all the numbers and all the measurements. If you were curious about the measurements and the math that I use,
be sure to check that out. Your shower plate, which, I guess that's what this thing is called. – [Tara] Hey, babe? – Yeah? – [Tara] How long is that gonna be? – The whole thing? – [Tara] Well, how much
longer do you have? I'm hungry. – Probably, I don't know.
I never done it before. Maybe half an hour to an hour. You know, when you film stuff that takes- – Here's my hand, you can see me. It's lunch time. It's lunch time, I'm hungry. You know how it is. You live in an RV and
it's a very small space, and all I want to do
is make a little lunch. – And I'm fouling it up with projects. – But I'm sure he wants lunch, too, so we're gonna take a break. I'm gonna make you take a break. – I don't mind breaks.
– With food. – As long as we're taking a lunch break, you might as well throw in some Daisy, 'cause people like Daisy. So, you might notice her
face looks a little odd, because I trimmed it recently, and I made her little
whiskers a little too short, so she's got a pointy nose. – [Tara] Aww, puppy dog. – You look less like a teddy
bear and more like a dog now. – [Tara] She's still
the cutest puppy ever. – By an average of 40%. – Spoiler alert, spoiler alert.
That's spoil alert. (Chad laughs) One more time. – Your RV's airflow by an average of 40%. – Spoiler, I can't say it. Spoiler alert. – Spoiler alert. – I can't.
– Spoiler. – [Both] Spoiler alert. (Chad laughs) – It's easier to get out of the ceiling. I'm taking these out,
'cause they're noisy. – [Tara] That's right. I don't like it. – Loud noises. – You know, all I could think
about when he was doing that was the nearest exit may be behind you.
Of 40%. – Spoiler alert, it is. – See, you didn't even
really say it right. – It's easier when
you're not in the moment. – I tell, that's why I'm telling you. We need to figure something else out. – [Chad] Okay. – Although it may look
like a regular flow, floam. Are we boring you? (Chad laughs).
