Hey Ed, Should Duct Be Added to an Undersized Supply to Reduce Static Pressure?

In This Edition of “Hey Ed,” Ed Discusses Should a Parallel Duct Be Added to an Undersized Supply to Reduce Static Pressure

Hey Ed, can a parallel duct be added to an undersized supply to reduce static pressure? It absolutely can, and this is a very interesting question. In fact, I believe that was Dave Hutchins, somebody I've known for a long time, a very long ACCA member, and I'll say it: a valued member. It adds a lot of good participation. I had a couple of neighborhoods in my service territory where we had duct systems that were originally installed for heat-only applications. So, anybody that's familiar with heat-only applications knows that you have duct systems that are rather small. Dave's market is central or southern Florida, which is not going to be a heat-only market, but they suffer from undersized duct systems like a lot of the country. So, the idea of getting rid of some of that excess static pressure in our supply side by adding an additional duct, or what Dave is calling a parallel duct system, is a great idea. Again, in my market, we had houses that just didn't have enough supply duct, but it was easy for us to add a 10 or a 12-inch round pipe to the supply plenum and then run additional branch runs off of that additional trunk. It's a great way to manage static pressure in a duct system and I want to mention, that it's quite common for us to add return because that's typically the low-hanging fruit and the easy way out, but it's not always something that we have the ability to do. This parallel trunk on a supply is a great idea. Glad somebody brought it to our attention. And that's the way I see it.

In This Edition of “Hey Ed,” Ed Discusses Should a Duct Be Added to an Undersized Supply to Reduce Static Pressure