Daily Home Renovation Tips

The instructions call for the blower ducts to be cut in length so that 1 inch is exposed beyond the gasket on the outside of the wall.

One problem. What if the depth of the wall exceeds the length of the blower duct? Ours did per the picture below.

In the above picture, you can see that the end of the blower duct and the black fan part at the end of the blower assembly barely come out of the wall, not nearly sufficient to be contained within the Solar Max 240. Oops.

This was caused because in our house we have that wood paneling behind the drywall.

Both the vertical wood paneling and the horizontal sheathing in behind are adding a couple inches to the total depth between the exterior brick on the outside of the wall and the drywall on the inside.

What to do? First, let’s deal with the blower assembly.

In the above picture you can see we have disassembled the unit cover. On the ground is the interior cover containing the blue washable filter. Notice the four long silver metal screws holding the component with the black fan (at Bennett’s right hand) at the end of the unit to the wiring housing component (at Bennett’s left hand).  Do you see how each of these long screws protrude about 3 to 4 inches into the part of the blower assembly by Bennett’s left hand?

All we did was to measure how much distance we needed to extend the end of the blower assembly past the bricks on the outside wall so it would be sufficiently contained within the solar air collector. It was about an additional 2 and 1/2 inches that was needed. So, we simply adjusted the original assembly to increase the distance between two components.

Notice in the above picture the significantly decreased length of the 4 metal screws at each corner of the front of the blower assembly.

Now, when the extended blower assembly is placed into the opening in the wall you can see, if you compare to the very first picture in this article, that the blower assembly now sufficiently extends away from the outside wall.

But what about the blower duct? There is too much space between the end of the blower duct and the extended blower assembly.

Return tomorrow to see how we extended the blower duct.

To continue to the next article in this series, simply select this link to Part 12 - Extending the Blower Duct.