July 2nd, 2011
HVAC
About these Photos:
1: These photos were taken on the 3rd of July, but are being posted on the 2nd because that is when the story takes place.
2: These photos are of the clean up the next day (the 3rd) not of the actual project. This is mainly because I didn't want to damage my camera.
The Story
For the last year or so we have heard birds rattling around in the vents above the master bathroom and the guest bathroom. For the most part we ignored them but figured we would have to deal with them at some point. About a year ago I called some people up and told them over the phone what the issue was. They brought someone out who thought they were cleaning our air ducts and basically told us we were crazy and there was no chance that something would be in the vents.
So, we continued on but heard noises in the summertime and basically ignored it. We took the fan covers off, but weren’t able to access anything above the fan. We were under the notion that to fix the problem one would have to get to it from the roof.
This year, my dad came up with a latter and I climbed on the garage roof but didn’t feel comfortable going up on the roof of the house. Our roof is at a 40 degree angle and I didn’t have shoes that provided enough traction. So again, we ignored the problem knowing that eventually we would have to deal with it.
On Saturday we found little bugs crawling around the vent areas and decided it was time to do something about it. We knew we had access to the space between the fan and the roof but didn’t think to go back there to fix the problem.
The main issue is that the insulation that is back there is blown insulation and as you can tell from the first photo, it goes everywhere. So on Saturday, I removed the piping from the vent to the roof on both the east and west sides, replaced it will a new tube. I also put up a screen mesh on the roof side so hopefully birds will not nest there again.
It took about five hours to do both sides. The biggest difficulty other than the insulation was the heat and the confined space. I bought a respirator and gloves and was planning on doing a Breaking Bad type portrait when I was done but they were covered in insulation.
