Hvac School - For Techs, By Techs

Neil Comparetto and John Semmelhack of the Comfort Squad join Bryan to discuss high-quality value design in a high-performance home. They explain how they design HVAC systems (heat pumps) for low-load homes in ways that are affordable, efficient, and comfortable. High-performance, low-load homes need to be energy-efficient AND comfortable, and it can be a challenge to get both. Manual J calculations aren’t as common as they probably should be, and it can be difficult to get accurate data about air leakage, power consumption, and radiant gains as well. So, John and Neil try to collect their own data and do aggressive load calculations to avoid the fudge factors that are all too common. The air velocity inside the ducts tends to be lower in these sorts of systems. When you have relatively low airflow in the ductwork of high-performance homes, you don’t need as many ducts or for the ductwork to be particularly large. With minimalistic ductwork, supply register placement, face velocity, and throw become very impo