Parts have arrived, the week has been booked off, so let's get things moving for real. We'll start by yeeting the HRV up my shiny new attic ladder.
But because this will be a long post, not until after the break. Click through to continue reading.
I'm mounting the HRV on the underside of the roof, so two pieces of Universal Wood bridge the gap between the rafters, and then the mounting brackets for the HRV get screwed into them.
And the HRV just slots right in easy-peasy.
Speaking of parts, the collars for the round duct have come in.
A quick hole poked right in the middle of my register box gives me a pivot for my compass to mark out a 5 inch circle.
And then I use a step drill to expand it out to about 1/2".
This is so I can get the snips started in here, making a spiral cut from the center outwards.
It's a bit of a balancing act between making a tight spiral which is easy to cut, or making a wide spiral and not having to cut nearly as far.
I probably could have gone wider than this, but if it works it works.
Next the collar gets shoved into the hole.
And the little insulation flange gets cut off, since these boxes aren't going to get an insulation blanket, but will instead just be buried in the attic insulation. I could have got the collars without the flange for a buck cheaper, but they would have taken longer to arrive.
Anyway, the fingers get folded over on the inside.
And taped up.
And after doing this taping, I'm starting to see why people like using duct mastic. It certainly would have been easier to just brush on some magic goop here rather than tearing off a bunch of bits of tape to seal this up. Ah well, lesson learned I suppose.
On the second box I cut a wider spiral and things went ok, so another lesson learned there.
It also got booted and taped.
Naturally the prefilter box also needs a boot to the head.
And that's exactly what it got. It also needs some gasket to go around the door.
Which it also got.
I waited until now to install the door hardware as it's not always easy to know in advance how much/little the gasket will compress, and so there's a risk of installing the door too tight to the box, or too loose. But now that the gasket is on I can just clamp the door to the box and install the hardware.
And speaking of the hardware, the pre-drilled holes are a bit big for the 1/8" rivets I have, so instead of getting bigger rivets I'll just drill a few extra holes to act as positioning pins and...
Oh right, it's stainless steel hardware. I guess I can't crank the drill speed to "full send" and just shove it in there. Well, luckily I buy these 1/8" drill bits by the bucket, so there's plenty more where that came from.
So with a little bit of struggle, the hinges are on.
As are the latches.
And then it gets screwed into some Universal Wood+ to secure it to the rafters behind the HRV.
Now seems like a good time to install some ducts, but let's have a little daisy refresher first.
Ah, that's more like it. Anyway, back to it.
I'll be putting the fresh air vent in the main open living space area thingie. I dunno what to call this part of the house when there aren't really any walls to separate it from most of the other places in the house. I think at one point it was being used as a dining area, but it's my bicycle corner now so whatever.
I've got a 4x8 vent box, so sticking it about 8 inches from either wall seems like a decent plan. I just need to mark it out, cut the drywall, and...
Oh, hm. That ceiling joist that I thought was right at the wall turned out to be about a foot over into the ceiling itself. So, slight change of plans I guess, it'll be 16 inches from one wall and 8 inches from the other.
The extra chunk of Universal Wood here was my addition, to give me something to screw the box into. The joist that the diagonal brace is tied to is what messed up my first attempt at positioning this register box.
Well, it's nothing that a little caulk and paint can't fix.
And with the register grille installed, you'd never notice anything at all went awry.
Well, assuming you're not at the top of a ladder staring at it directly. But even then you'd probably be distracted by the screws being hex head for some reason rather than a flat head phillips. I'm not sure why they made that choice for the included hardware, but at least it's white so it doesn't stand out too much from a normal viewing distance.
Well, this vent won't do any good without some ducting hooked up to it, so it seems reasonable to tackle that next.
I get the feeling I should aim away from face when I cut open these jack-in-the-boxes that are definitely not 25 feet long.
But as it turned out, the explosion of ductwork was a bit less violent than I anticipated, and I was able to extract the contents without any grievous bodily harm, which led me to the next activity: duct stretching.
If you leave the duct crinkled up, not only will you have a lot less duct than you need, but it also won't flow air worth shit thanks to the inner liner being all wrinkly and loose.
Anyway, it turns out that this stuff is really easy to install, especially now that I have a zip tie tool to pull the industrial strength HVAC zip ties nice and tight.
It was a piece of cake to go from the register box to the HRV.
And the HRV to the prefilter box. I haven't hooked up the prefilter box to the intake vent, though, because both it and the tee haven't arrived yet, and both of those are fairly vital pieces for this project.
The good news is that with the duct strapped to the roof rafters I didn't lose very much height in here. I was worried that things might get kind of cramped, but it turned out not to be an issue.
So while I'm waiting for those parts to arrive (they're promised to be here by Sunday) I'll have a go at removing one of the old, noisy exhaust fans which I'll be replacing with the HRV stale air intake boxes that I folded up.
This one is as ugly as it is filthy.
The filth here is mostly attic dirt, with some rust and a few dead bugs tossed in for good measure. For some reason that is well beyond my comprehension, the boxes for these exhaust fans are absolutely swimming with holes and gaps, and I guess the manufacturer just expects the installer to tape them up, which I can guarantee you has happened exactly zero times in the entire history of exhaust fan installations.
Of course, it also doesn't help that there's a 1 inch gap on one side of the box, which was just covered over with painter's tape. Out of sight, out of mind I guess.
Anyway, after much sweating, struggling and swearing in the attic, I managed to disconnect the fan from the power and ducting and finally evict it from my ceiling.
And since this hole is larger than my new register box, and quite irregularly sized, and completely unsupported on all but one side, I framed up the opening with some Universal Wood.
And then topped off the opening with a temporary sheet of cardboard because I ran well out of time for working on this, and I want to get the drywall patched up before installing the new box.
So good progress has been made, but I definitely won't be wrapping up this project before my week of vacation is done. As we well know by now, I am the king of underestimating how long it takes to get this kind of stuff done, and this project has been no exception.
The good news is that there isn't much left to do that will require large chunks of dedicated time to tackle. Patching up the drywall should be doable during weekday evenings, and I still have Sunday afternoon to tackle poking the new hole for the fresh air intake, which is now scheduled to arrive on Saturday apparently. I have high hopes for the removal of the other exhaust fan being much easier than this one (famous last words aside), and then it's just some electrical which I've already got a head start on, and installing the remainder of the ducting which goes pretty quick.
But that will all have to wait for the next blog post.
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