Good book on duct installation?
Any recommendations for a book that covers residential HVAC duct installation? I’d like to find something that’s to-the-point but contains all the common cases like attic, basement, sheet metal, flex, etc. Something like the HVAC equivalent of Peter Hemp’s “Plumbing a House” which tells you just what you need to know to do your own plumbing on a new house and nothing that you don’t.
I’ve looked over a few HVAC books intended for trade-schools and they go way in-depth on useless things (did you know commercial freezers use ammonia as a refrigerant?), but then glaze over the important stuff like how to make air-tight duct connections.
I plan to hire a service to do the duct sizing and load calculations.
I feel like there must be a great book out there, since there’s great books on everything else, but I haven’t found it yet. Suggestions?
GBA Detail Library
A collection of one thousand construction details organized by climate and house part
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I've recently been researching duct design and found this helpful:
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/53352.pdf
Thanks for the link. That seems to be more focused on the system design. I was looking for something that covers the actual installation, like what part(s) you need to transition from one type of duct to the other, pros and cons of duct types, the process for fabricating duct-work with boards or metal, how to attach insulation to them, etc .
Our local community colleges offer apprenticeships in sheet metal fabrication. Somewhere like that near you might have course materials they could direct you to.
I don't know of any books on good duct installation. YouTube is likely your best current source actually. Try a few different search terms. I haven't found anything comprehensive.
This is one pretty good resource for some basics:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC63-PRjN9eyJvqcNmxYQvJw
That looks like a decent link. I've been finding bits and pieces, but it's frustrating. On one video about a dryer vent the guy said, "everybody knows how to strap a dryer vent to studs so I'm not going to go into that". I'm sure it's stupidly obvious once you see it done once, but it's the basics like that, that everyone skips over.
And then there's all the "I'm going to record myself trying something for the first time without any experience and call it a 'how to....'" videos.
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