Right off the bat, I wanna thank Steve Brown for his EXCELLENT write-up & photos. Although I'd read the other posts & how-to's in this thread... as one who's never worked on heating & cooling issues before, I had resisted doing anything to my rig, because I had no idea what I'd be looking for. Your photos really helped!!
Armed with Steve's photos & the knowledge from everyone's write-ups... I finally got around to tackling this project on my rig this week.
Oh, and as a side note... for any of you big guys wondering about the load-weight rating of your RV's roof... well, I can report that this is one area where Dutchmen did ok. The roof of my Voltage 3200 easily held my 350+ lbs. with no trouble at all. Didn't even feel the roof flex any as I walked on it.
So with that out of the way... I went about the task of removing the A/C unit and taping up the air box. Since Steve did such a great job of taking pictures with his, I didn't bother to stop and take any of mine. Suffice it to say that things looked pretty much as his did, except maybe not as bad. In any event, I removed all of the OEM foil-tape... blew out as much sawdust & crap as I could with my air hose... and re-taped everything up nice & neat. So long as the tape holds, it should be fine.
Next up was my interior vents. I didn't remember seeing a lot of pictures of this, so I took a few of my own as I did my project.
I removed all 4 vents the main cabin... 2 in the bedroom... 1 in the bathroom... and finally the 2 in the garage.
With the vents removed, I found the original work here wasn't really all that bad. It wasn't 'nice & neat', per se... but at least the foil-tape was where it was supposed to be in most cases. But in some, there were a few small gaps here & there between the vent ducting & the ceiling.
Here's one that's "ok":
And here's one that has a little bit of a gap:
As such, I removed the OEM tape from all of the vents, and decided to re-do them myself. Here's a picture with the OEM tape removed, showing the the gap between the vent duct and the ceiling that needs to be closed up & taped off:
Using some high-grade 3M foil tape that I got at Lowes... I re-taped all of the vents like so:
Next, I used my knife to 'score' the tape about every inch or so... and then folded the resulting 'sections' back over the top & bottom. In the picture below, you can see what I mean by seeing the cuts (scores) in the foil... and at this point, I've only folded one section over the top of the vent. I folded the remaining sections the same way.
I then re-installed the vents... and in the main cabin, I simply left the screw-in covers off:
After I was done... I taped a small piece of toilet paper to each vent, and turned on the A/C. The result can be seen by clicking on the image below: (will open a new window or tab)
And that's it.
While I really have no way of knowing whether this will improve the cooling issue I had with my rig last winter... I do know the airflow is much improved over what I had. I guess I'll find out when I take it to FL in February.