It's a fair question to ask them why they're flip flopping so much. Do they not have a good understanding of return vents? In general, I think you can go hogwild with return vents and make them as big as you want. Youre giving the system every chance it can to breath easy. But obviously the tradeoff here is cutting holes in your floor.
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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But obviously the tradeoff here is cutting holes in your floor.
Yeah which put me off at first but there's this whole dead space in the kitchen that isn't useful that I realized and pointed out to them after i was initially put off by the floor thinking (which i still said was ok)
The thing is i am not good at confrontation or normal social interaction and without much sleep I'm going to come off as an angry tweaker rambling at them about what the LLM said about airflow
But im finishing cooking stuff for dinner and then i'm going to go be like uh hey what's up with that
update: not sure if it's because i asked a follow up about the return vent at 2pm but this 1 day installation is going to be finished tomorrow
At some point their "we'll have two crews out there" turned into two guys who seem like teenagers but are probably in their 20s and an electrician
#JustNeededToVent
the reason for 78% of all my posting honestly
Update: the guy came back in saying something about there not being a long distance between the return vent and the unit outside and something about how that makes it fine but said he can add a 12x12 return vent if we want him to which I think would give it on the lower end of adequate airflow but i dunno
i literally do not know if I'm making them do unnecessary work or if the work they're going to do will still be insufficient
I think my biggest lesson from this is any time we get work done and some guy comes out to give a quote I want that guy there when they do shit so i can be like "hey buddy didn't you say..."
I fucked up too by not mowing the grass, it's not unmanageably tall but I'm sure they'd have preferred that and boy that's a lot of bits of insulation in the yard
clippings everywhere is probably worse than grass that's a little taller than a football pitch
it's uh, a bit taller than football field grass, I should have mowed like a week ago probably but like, effort, also it's variably either too hot or too rainy or both
I just don't imagine they'll be able to clean up all the shit i'm seeing even if they're trying their best and it's in part because the grass is kind of high but idk I don't know their work so maybe they've got it figured out
I think they're coming back from lunch now so I get to go ask why it seems like they're severely fucking up with this return vent deal (again, according to what i'm being told by the llm)
but I also mentioned to the guy who came out to do the quote something about having a media filter cabinet because I like the idea of actually being able to use one of those fancy high MERV filters they sell but which fuck up literally everyone's HVAC systems, and my understanding is one of those would effectively reduce the needed airflow, so, like, I dunno, maybe they're doing that
it's just if all it is is going from a 16x20 to 16x25 return vent the llm's telling me that's just half a square foot of surface area added and it needs 4 square feet total to handle 1200cfm, which would be like, yeah, a whole extra return vent
also if you take the clippings from your yard you're robbing your yard of precious nitrogen 