Wall of Ignoramuses

On my website I already have two pages dedicated to the good and to the bad ductwork installation namely: Wall of Pride and Wall of Shame. However, as I have noticed not all the installations could be painted in the white or black, a lot of them lay in between!
In addition, and this is more important, if some bad installations are done by intentionally reckless installers, the others are done because an installer doesn’t know any better. An installer is thinking that he is doing his best, or he was trained to do it this way and as a result he is doing something what should not be done!

Just one example, I have a co-worker who has about ten years of experience and should be considered as a journeyman now. However he was very poorly trained and he is making a lot of unnecessary steps which could be avoided if he would be having better training and education.
For instance, when he is running a heat run he put a hanger on first, and then 5 feet long piece of pipe, after that another hanger and another piece of pipe and so on! This is huge waste of time and materials.

• If he is cutting a pipe he is making multiple marks on it before he actually cut it out.
• If he is cutting a duct he put it on the floor up side down and again making unnecessary marks.
• If he is nailing blockers he nails them up side down and so on.

What is the most appalling here is that this guy use to work as a foreman in another company! He told me that he was very stubborn and demanding in his pursuit to make everyone in his crew to do everything just like him! They even gave him a nickname “Dickhead”. Can you imagine how many ignorant installers he trained over the time and how many ignorant installers were trained by his trainees? Just unbelievable!
For another hand he is a smart guy and if he is doing something new he learn it very fast, but unfortunately he cannot reset himself and his old knowledge stands in the way of his success all the time!

So, what can you do to avoid such a fate? You have to educate yourself!
If you are lucky enough and working for a good company with good traditions nonetheless I would recommend you to buy my “Ductwork Installation Guide”, because it will take many years for you to come through everything what you are able to find in this textbook and what is most important – to learn how to do installation the right way!
Dozens of people already bought this book and you won’t be the first and you won’t be the last!

If you are not that lucky I strongly recommend you to buy this textbook or if you have any doubts at least a chapter or two and see for yourself if it is working for you or not!
Many people are doing just that and I will refund your money if you decide to buy a book as a whole!
So, please give it a try, otherwise welcome to the "Wall of Ignoramuses" page!

Okey, let’s start this page with these two pictures:

 
As you can see installers who were doing Rough-in in this house do not know how to cut out the bottom plate! As a result they probably spend at least 15 minutes for each hole instead of only from 2 to 4 minutes if they would know how to do it right!

The 4” rigid flex, which you can see in the picture on the left, is a part of the fresh air intake. So in this case an installer didn’t know that this flex or pipe should be insulated and forgot to install a fresh air damper.
In addition there are more mistakes:
While he was doing gas piping he forgot to install a drop leg, tie up the flexible gas line and probably a few more, but I got only one picture of this ignorant installation!

The 4” B-vent pipe in the next picture was installed too close to the brick chimney. Because of that flue gases staying around the pipe for too long, water vapors are condensing on the pipe and as a result you can see that the pipe started to rust.

 A condensate line in the next picture was run with only three mistakes!
An installer failed to install a U-trap; he did not run a separate pipe from the pan and he directed an elbow to the pan. However I hope he installed a sensor, which will shut off the air handler if water actually will fill the pan!

What you can see in this picture is a crawl space. It is always make me angry when nowadays some idiots building their houses on the crawl spaces! I probably won’t ever understand why they are doing that! I think that this is just highest level of ignorance and stupidity on the homeowner’s part and indifference on the builder’s part!
The homeowner in this particular case is claiming that this crawl space is actually 5’ deep, but in the picture it looks deeper. However if it is true it makes this homeowner even more stupid than anybody else! He could easily add three more rows of the cinderblocks and make it a basement! How much this idiot have saved?
From the ductwork/furnace installation point of view this kind of crawl space makes work there just unbearable! You can’t stand on your knees because you will be too short unless you are Michel Jordan and you can’t stand on your feet unless you are a Mexican!

What you can see in the pictures is definitely a hack job!
All PVC pipes are out of plumb. Even ¾” condensate line has two mistakes:
Installer probably tried to make a handle for the furnace, otherwise why he installed that 2" elbow with the short piece of open pipe is a big mystery to me.
As you can see in the first picture to the left he was too lazy or maybe he was trying to save a few bucks, but he made a combustion air intake right from the basement. It is true that some manufacturers allow you to do that, but I believe that it significantly undermining high efficiency notion which was proposed to the homeowner in the first place!

PVC venting in the pictures looks very sloppy! However it is difficult to say just looking at these two pictures if it was done intentionally and then it’s belong to the Wall of Shame or an installer was just ignorant and stupid and then it should remain on this page… Its looks like that an installer was trying to keep pipes as close to the furnace as possible, but as a result you can see two drunken white skin pitons climbing from the furnace to the joist space!
Cold air return duct looks also very weird! Of course, maybe an installer didn’t have any choice, but it seems to me that this particular installer just didn’t know any better!

This installation is just plain stupid! In my life I saw a lot of bad mistakes, but never like this one! This ignorant installer connected a cold air boot to the back of the furnace!
And look at the cold air return drop this moron saved a couple of bucks on the transition and now it looks like shit!

I just could not believe my eyes! Someone installed a humidifier right above the media filter! Such an ignorance! Should I keep commenting on this one? Probably not!

This picture was taken in California. Ignoramus who did this installation probably mixed up the PVC pipe termination with the B-vent one! According to code PVC pipe should be terminated only 12” above the roof line and no elbow is necessary! But this installer could be proud of himself: he combined two codes together and even improved them a bit!

An installer in this case definitely was doing his best, he was trying very hard and because of that made only two mistakes:
He mounted Automatic Digital Humidifier Control after humidifier and he connected this flow through humidifier to the cold air return! Other than that everything is done just fine. That means that this guy was trying his best, but lack of education played for him a bad joke!

I took all these pictures from the web and I’ll keep going to continue doing that, but if you got a weird installation just like one of the above send me some pictures and I will publish them on this page.
Thanks
Ed

So, you just have seen a few examples of very bad installations, nevertheless, in my opinion, the installers thought that they were doing alright! Why does this happening? The answer is very simple:
Because all these installers and dozens of thousands more are undertrained and undereducated!

I am running this website already for four years and I know very well that only tiny percentage of the visitors of this site are professional installers. Unfortunately most of them seeing this profession as a temporary one and not interested in additional education.
The same trend I am seeing among their bosses. There is a website http://hvac-talk.com where a lot of heating contractors wasting their time explaining over and over again the same things and answering the same questions! Why they are doing that? Because, in my opinion, they hope that someone will be from their arias and they will get more business this way.
So, I have contacted quite a few of them and nobody ever responded, they are stubbornly thinking that their installers doing okay just the way they trained them and it is good enough!

Well, well, well, right now I am collecting some pictures from the Wall of Pride Forum posted on that website and I am inviting everyone to take a look on the installations these guys are considering “The Best”!...

Ed

So, here we go!
Look at this monstrous installation! The installer who posted these pictures on the Wall of Pride forum really thinking, and I’m not kidding, that this installation is a good one!?!

He is claiming that this is 120,000 BTU furnace with 4 ton AC, so what? This kind of furnace doesn’t require use of two 24 x 16 return ducts with these enormous off-sets! He should put this furnace on the filter box and use single 24 x 12 cold air drop, that’s it.
Now, look at these humidifiers. He ran 6” pipes only horizontal and vertical, someone possibly told him that this way the

installation looks better, but this way it’s looks stupid. The same thing happened with the condensate lines. I would never run them this way, it is looks weird! Beside that I would never run condensate line from both outlets from the AC coil and from the furnace it was ran absolutely wrong.
He did not put a drop leg on the gas pipe and he posted blurry pictures, otherwise there are probably even more mistakes.
However, the most terrible mistake is – this guy really thinking that he can be proud of this installation…