Here are some pictures taken by Doug, one of our amazing HVAC Service Techs, of an installation he saw in a house this week. The call came in that their house was not heating and cooling properly. It is now wonder, after seeing these pictures.

Check out the 4" return platform made out of a crate. Nice use of 2 coils stacked on top of each other. The "return" is to the right of the washer and dryer and pulls only from the garage.

Here is another photo

Here is where the "return" air enters the 4" platform.

And yet another

Hot garage air, fumes from the car and whatever other things may have been stored in the garage, not to mention hot/cold air were the only things feeding into this system.

For those of you not too familiar with how air conditioning is supposed to work, here is the short version. A blower pushes air into your house through the supply ducts. It is then sucked back into the blower through a return duct. Each time it gradually gets hotter or colder, depending on whether you are in cooling or heating mode. Eventually, it reaches the  desired temperature set on your thermostat and shuts down.

In the case of this system, it isn’t sucking in any air from the house, since all of the air enters from the garage, unless of course the door from the house to the garage is always open (yuck).

There are a lot of things wrong with this installation above. Worse, I think that they are going to keep it this way. Doug turned this over to me so that we could fix it, but the homeowner hasn’t responded to my messages. Hopefully, she will get it fixed.  She was advised that this is not only a nightmare from a comfort and high utility bill standpoint, but more importantly, dangerous to their health.