Even back before I knew I wanted a heat pump, and a pony, I knew I wanted to handle some air. In HVAC, this is usually handled by an air handler. Duh. That’s a big cabinet-looking appliance with a big fan in it in most people’s houses. If you have a standard furnace, the unit itself usually functions as the air handler too. You burn some sort of gas or goo to heat up some air and then you blow it through some ducts hither and yon around your house. Boilers do the same sort of thing, but they heat water instead of air, and circulate that around.

Well, I was producing hot air without the goo already. I”m nor referring to blogging here. I was burning pellets in a big stove and dumping the hot air in the dining room. Luckily, the dining room was more or less centrally located, but heat takes some persuasion to get it to go to where you want it. The little 200CFM fan in the back of the pellet stove wasn’t going to spread it around 2,000 square feet of house. We didn’t (don’t) have the money for a proper central heating system, so we resorted to our default guerilla warfare approach to the problem.

Way back when, I outlined our scheme to get heat from the dining room upstairs into our children’s bedrooms in The Tin Man’s Autopsy. We couldn’t afford an air handler, but we could put some tin pipes between floors to coax the heat upstairs.

Then I painstakingly explained Eight Things That Won’t Happen in Heating, to outline why I was doing what I was doing in the manner I was doing it, but I freely admit I did a lousy job explaining what I wanted a pony for. This HVAC explanation was roundly ignored by several people in the comments, who love them some ceiling fans, and the rest of the internet, more or less. After a somewhat charming lagniappe filled with my children’s music videos and earnest pleas to my wife not to leave my sorry ass even though I didn’t get her a pony for our anniversary, I finally got around to Let’s See if Sippican Can Tie His Heating System Into His Sewer System.

Of course everyone immediately lost interest in my ersatz air handling explanations and glommed onto the Geyser of Excrement tale. I know I did. In the world of construction triage, fixing a problem with not enough BTUs floating by comes well after stopping merde floating by in the basement. You can read all about it at the link, if you like. Lots and lots of people have. It’s a testament to what’s important in this online world that the most notable thing I ever wrote was about just how full of shite my life had become.

But ignored in the scum scrum was the fact that we did actually solve our air handling problem, albeit incrementally, not exponentially. We installed ducts up high in the dining room wall, and ran them up into the second floor. It’s all achieved inside of closets, a happy accident of floor layout. The inlet pipe was up by the ceiling in the dining room. There were two outlets upstairs, one for each kid’s bedroom. We simply stood a regular tabletop fan on top of the big cabinet that once stood there, and it blew the heated air upstairs. It wasn’t a pony or anything, but the kids still liked it.

I had bought enough tin to make a cold air return as well. I planned on recovering cold air near the floors in the bedrooms upstairs, and dumping it through the floor directly over the pellet stove. It would make a nice convection loop, and make it easier to force air up the ducts into the rooms in the first place. It was a great idea that was not to be. When the geyser hit, I had to return the remaining HVAC ducts to the store to get a credit to apply to the cost of some of the plumbing supplies we were going to need tout de suite. I was Tantalus, but I wasn’t up to my knees in water, exactly.

But the seeds of inspiration were sown. I went into my closet and looked up, and saw ductwork heading upstairs. Then I looked straight down, and realized the furnace was directly below in the basement. From the inside of that closet, and the closet above it upstairs, I could picture ductwork coming straight up from the basement and serving the living room, dining room, three bedrooms, and the hallways and staircases on two floors.

It would take years of scrimping and saving, but I could see a way to heat the whole house with a central heating plenum and ducts running straight up through the center of the house, and not lose an inch of livable floor space in the bargain. It wasn’t a pony, but central heating would still be pretty good. Besides, I’m not sure a pony would taste all that good, even if we got our hands on one.

[To be continued]