have you ever seen a heating register
that looks like this before we installed a high velocity heating and
cooling system in our home over a year ago
i'm going to talk about why we did it and whether or not we would do it again if you're wondering what a high velocity
heating and cooling system is it's sometimes referred to as a mini
duct system it's basically really small duct work that moves at a
really high speed this system is most popular in retrofit
scenarios where people are renovating old houses
that don't have a lot of room to add ductwork when it used to have baseboard
heat and the smaller size of ductwork makes it a lot easier to add into chases
or into existing walls in our case we did it primarily because
it let us zone our system a lot more efficiently
by zoning i mean that we have independent control
over our first floor second floor and basement heat
okay so i'm upstairs on our second floor you can see we've got a totally open
railing from the stairs and of course because of that we're
always fighting the stack effect all our hot air is always trying to rise
up to our second floor and like most houses if we don't have
our zoning in play the second floor is going
to be anywhere from three to eight degrees difference in
temperature from the main floor and then the basement
okay guys so here's a quick look at the air handler that runs this system
this is basically the fan blowing the hot or cold air and you see that we have
two takeoffs that run the two separate zones one for
the second floor one for the main floor and basement and
they basically run on zone dampers that open or close when
they get a cue that is their time to shine
you might ask why wouldn't we have just done this with a conventional hvac
system one much harder to hide all the duct
work and two they're just not the best systems to
zone for a couple of reasons so here's the thing when you zone a
system in theory you're normally only ever heating or
cooling one floor at a time so you're not using the same volume of
air to push cold or hot air to the entire
house at one time you're only doing half or less of the
house so therefore you need less fan size and you need less ductwork
volume so this is what the high velocity ductwork looks like now
it looks fairly large but that's because it's insulated and there's actually not
a lot of volume to it so it can crunch down into small walls
and what i'm going to show you is that you can see the insulation
that helps keep the sound down somewhat and then inside of here you're going to
see what the actual ductwork looks like it's this corrugated
pipe and it's only about two inches in diameter so
it's much smaller than what you're typically going to see
for your solid metal uh round and square ductwork that you're going to have in a
conventional system so there it is guys okay so we use this to hide all our
bulkheads and have a great zone system so how did it do on those aspects it did
great the next question is why wouldn't
everybody do it this way and there is one simple answer
noise hey love do we have any of those new floss picks do we have any of those new floss picks okay guys so the system is off right now
i'm gonna go hit the thermostat and then i'm gonna
come back and i'm gonna leave this rolling so you
can hear the sound right now this is just the ambient sound
of the fan moving fresh air i don't know if you can hear that and i'm gonna go cue the ac so this
thing's gonna come on full blast you'll see the sound difference here so while the nature of the insulated
duct work is that it cancels the sound transfer enough that
you can't lay in your bedroom and listen down in
on your parents conversations you remember doing that it still
doesn't create a perfectly sound dampen system
okay so there's no denying it this system is noisy
and even though most of times in the house we either have music playing
or company over or kids yelling and playing that generally doesn't
bother us but when it comes time to calm down and we
start doing the low level activities before bedtime
for example trying to watch a show or talk to each other in bed
any of these type of things that's when you really start to notice that this
system does overpower some of the low level
noise in your life it's not uncommon that we'll have to
crank up the volume on the tv rewind to here apart again or just wait
until the system shuts off to play the movie
okay so all things considered there is some small compromises that we make for
the times when this duct work is obviously louder than a conventional
system and it's definitely noticeable i think that we would entertain using
the system again because the benefits of having those
flat ceilings no bulkheads all our duct work hidden and having
perfect temperature control over each floor in our house
is awesome and i think that it outweighs the limited times when this duct work is
intrusive in our sound environment so all things
considered this one's going to be a goal for us
again if we ever decide to build again as crazy as that would be
if you guys want to catch more videos like this i'm putting out more reviews
on the way that we built our home and i'm trying to pass on any of the
lessons that i learned to you guys
