I've been accepting the fact that all this duct work, is just going to be in my way. Today, it finally dawned on me, that I don't have to "settle" for this. I don't want this duct work here, I'm making a room in the basement for me, I should just move the duct work out of my way and get the room I want.
Now that I'm looking at this in the right light, I've come up with a plan for how I want to attack this. Hours of researching on the ole web, and I've decided that HVAC conventions can probably be overlooked. We're really talking about a small house, one or 2 ducts could easily provide enough heat to keep the house comfortable.
I'm not suggesting getting rid of any vents, I'm just going to reduce the volume of air (which by my estimation is too high for the space) and increase the velocity (solving my warm air delivery service, and turning it into hot air delivery).
I've been in this house for somewhere around 10 years, in that time I've never really noticed hot air coming out of any of the vents. My thinking is, since all my vents have their own ducts, that is a relatively high volume of stagnant (not to mention cold) air filling each of those up. This cooler air mixes with the hot air from the furnace and delivers warm (75-80 degree) air to my living space.
I can reduce that volume, by running a trunk and run ventilation system, which will reduce the total length of ducts by around 25 feet. In addition to the loss of duct length, each vent would push out smaller amounts of the cooler stagnant air, and deliver hot air in a matter of second.
To accomplish this, I wanted to keep my 7" diameter duct on the trunk and push it down to 6" for each run (increasing velocity). Sadly, as it turned out, the hardware store, does not carry 7" y's nor do they carry 7" t's. So a quick rework, in my head at the hardware store, I decided 6" would have to suffice for the trunk and the runs. This will still give plenty of velocity and should maintain a respectable volume for each room. My only real problem, is I wanted the trunk to remain 7" to maintain enough pressure through the whole system so as not to lose pressure the further away I got (or at least not loose as much).
My house is an open design, so there's no real doors to speak of (bedrooms and bathroom only, but bathroom has no vent). After working the numbers and doing the calculations, I should have more than enough volume coming through the system combined that it's just not going to matter anyway. One room will be below the recommended volume, but it's still an open layout and the cold air will be rushing along the floor to find it's way back down, allowing displacement of air through the entryway, it's just not going to matter.
With that said, I'm excited, this will allow me to keep a lot of headroom for a good majority of my addition.
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