All Forum Posts by: Genny Li

The system was replaced in 2018 (not by me!), so I don't plan on replacing it for a long time.  I'm pretty sure it's oversized.  I haven't done the heat calcs myself, but it's a 2nd floor condo of 3 floors, and even eyeballing the numbers, it don't look right, as they say.

They decided to build in the "blocking portions of the registers" into the ducts themselves when the builder designed it.  This was done with the insulated duct foil sandwich material (called duct panel, at least in one brand), so it's at least easy to remove where it's been done too much, but it's actually part of the problem.  The cold room doesn't have the register blocked at all, and all but two other vents in the whole place are mostly blocked, which can't be good for the blower motor.  The coldest room in summer will most likely be the coldest in winter, too, which makes permanent fixed dampers problematic.

Smart vents would be an adaptive response to the current temp to block/unblock each register.  It's like doing active damper zoning, but without the dampers.  If I had a variable speed blower that could be synced to the registers like dampers in a zoning system, it would be a no-brainer way of putting zoning in.  But I don't.  And now the blower is blowing against a ton of permanently restricted dampers. :/

I've been a bit burned by CR and the way they measure reliability.  I've started looking at Yale Appliance's take on things on their YT channel. Obviously, they sell appliances, and some of their reviews are not applicable to landlords, but it's a good source, I think.

You make structural engineers smile at keeping a nice fat safety margin in their dead load calcs. loooool.

Here a the review of the PEX study from NSF:  https://d2evkimvhatqav.cloudfr...

It honestly seemed awfully hinky to me just from the abstract.  It looked like they did some creative parameter establishment to get publishable results.  Again, I'm jumpy about "forever chemicals" from plastics, but on a read through, it seemed like scaremongering on the order of reporting that copper pipes' metal leaching (and they do leach copper) and the lead in flux is enough to make your babies all low IQ--like the EPA scare that managed to get high levels of lead by carefully capturing the very first bit of water out of a faucet after it had been sitting for a while and not capturing a reasonable representation of the percentage in what a kid would get at a water fountain, for instance.

More than anything, it's making it good to have owned an apt building before the boom, as long as you didn't have too many people not paying....

Lol, thanks guys.  I'll just talk to my dad's fishing buddy.  He owns an HVAC company. ;) 

The TLDR is that is it literally built wrong and they clearly knew it was a bad design when they built it and so built in some hacks to mitigate the bad design, but hacks are bad.  It is not possible to change the orientation that's there, and it's also unfortunately obvious that adjusting vents manually is too hard for my renters (and I have evidence that it was for previous renters, too), so I'll pitch the idea of smart vents to him.  That may solve all the problems.  (Though of course technology is its own headache.)

You can alter them to be RF compatible...buuuuut a new cheap but not dated looking fan that doesn't have a pull chain is only $90. So I would go that route as soon as the starter dies.

This sucker is totally worth it BTW: https://www.amazon.com/Unger-M...

(Last time I tried to post this, it had Google's affiliate link from the search results.  Ooops!)

I used to use Quickbooks for my business but went back to Excel.  QB is pushy, and I don't like that.  Even synced to business cards, I just hated it.  As long as I'm the only one buying stuff, Excel is fine, and I find it easier to categorize stuff and navigate quickly.  I can also set up specialized number-crunching easier with Excel.  But I'm sure there are amazing QB features that I just don't know about.

I've seen people who have their own house on a large property add Air BNB mobile homes. I've seen the beach community mobile homes (where all the owners are pretty well off) on AirBNB. Never seen a regular MH in a regular park.

I've got a condo with a very poorly balanced HVAC, and it was built this way.  I posted a really involved post about my plans to remediate the problem, but I had a bright idea last night that may work.  Because this is a student rental and so is going to utilities included, I was already planning to get a smart thermostat and smart locks.  None have all the features I want, so I was already tied to getting Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi to go along with it, so I can script whatever I need.  I'm now thinking about trialing a smart vent (register) for the super over conditioned room.  If I like it in general, I can incorporate smart vents into geofencing rules for away/home status.  If anyone's home, the great room would be set to home status, but each bedroom would be set to home only when that individual tenant is at home.  (The four suites all have independent locks, as is the norm for student rentals.)

Anyone used smart vents in a rental?  I have plenty of experience scripting, and if I get stuck, hubster works in comp sci.