Picked up a new stock but dented Daikin furnace for $1200 a while back, and finally got around to installing it today. I had measured up and commissioned a plenum but fucked up a little bit, so it took longer to get the S-cleats properly installed and the plenum airtight than removing the old one, cutting in the cold air return, wiring the electrical and running the intake/exhaust pipes took put together. Approved ducting methods seem so fucking archaic, everything has to be tight but you can’t just put things together without taking half a dozen things apart to get it to fit. Of course, I had to fix one transition because I lost my temper and punched the shit out of it.
On the plus side, it only took 2 trips to Home Despot, the second one because the old switch had been drywalled in and was completely inaccessible. I cut the wires off it and put a new box and switch where I could reach it.
I need to get a condensate pump yet, and call for an inspection, but winter is still a few months off so I have time.
I’m in a pretty cold part of the world (N Canada) so heat pumps aren’t terribly effective or cheap compared to gas. But I still have a mini split and use it during the summer in combination with the furnace fan to circulate the cool around the house. I could have put an evaporator in the furnace plenum (along with condensate trap) but for the weekend worth of summer we enjoy here, it hardly seemed worth it.
In the shop at the farm, I’m currently working on a cooling system that can be switched from swamp cooler to urea melter, since we use a lot of liquid fertiizer and melting urea is one way to get a nitrogen source for spraying foliar fertilizer. Urea melting, being an endothermic reaction, needs a lot of heat to properly dissolve the urea by keeping it above the salt-out temperature. I’ve ordered a heat exchanger and plan to use a spa pump to circulate the solution through a closed loop glycol exchanger system, and cool the shop. I can put another heat exchanger in to utilize swamp cooling on the same loop and switch between them.
I used some old conveyor belting to isolate the furnace hanging in the attic in my other house at the farm.