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Re: my earlier toot.
Honest question - is a "utility room" some sort of Midwestern thing?
Talking about how to avoid running ducts through attics, it occurred to me that it might be.
Here, if you don't have a basement, there's usually a room with your furnace/air handler, water heater, and washer/dryer. Plumbing often routes there, too.
Sometimes it's less of a room and more of a closet, but we can't just stick the washer and water heater in the garage 'cause they'll freeze.
@TechConnectify I've thought about this a lot in my house and I'm not sure there's many other places the ducts can go.
The closet where the AC shares walls with a portion of the rooms, but not all of them.
There's no basement because the frost line is negligible, and the soil type precludes a basement anyway. (Inch-wide cracks and separation when the clay soil dries)
The roof crawl space has the sort of access to the upstairs necessary for ducting, and allows future access unlike walls.
@tevruden If you didn't see my earlier toot, just imagine all the ducts were hanging from the ceiling. Not above it, but hanging down below.
You can easily make that less ugly by boxing them in with a decorative soffit.
Now, I'm not suggesting you do this to your home, but that's what I'm suggesting should be normalized.
@tevruden I'm thinking of, like, a typical California ranch.
If there's a utility room or closet central to the structure, you can run a trunk duct around the perimeter of the home and add registers for each room near the window. For returns, add a through-the-wall vent above the doors (or, alternatively, just have a minimum door clearance to the floor) and draw air in from the hall.
That setup is already pretty common, except the ducts are *above* the ceiling for, most likely, cost reasons.
I'd bet cost via complexity. One hole in the ceiling is cheaper than entry and possibly exit holes in several rooms and whatever needs to be done to make it look visually appealing.
Thinking about it, a similar thing could be done in my house by keeping the ducting for two of the bedrooms in the conditioned space by going through the connected closets behind the AC, but that would have added complexity at building.
Might be worth it now tho.
@tevruden Well, at time of construction, I'm not even sure it would be that big of a deal. Done in the right order, you would install the ceiling first, then run the trunk duct before you enclose any walls.
A little extra framing around it for drywall isn't gonna add much in the context of building a new home, at least I wouldn't think so. Roll it into a mortgage payment and it might cost an extra $10/month which I'll bet you'd save in energy bills.
@tevruden But retrofitting is a lot more complex, for sure.
More than anything, I just want some California builders to come up here to the land of 95 degree summers with 70% humidity and -20 winters.
Somehow we manage to build homes for that - and they can, too!