We’d been noticing rather poor airflow in the family room since we purchase the house. Asked quite a few HVAC people – basically everyone who came to quote our new system both last year and this year. The only halfway sensible answer we got was from the company that installed our geothermal system: the sales guy said there is probably a damper at the trunk. Which is reasonable, but there’s no access panel or anything. And why would you put an adjustment lever in an inaccessible location and have it closed off??

Now that we’ve got our unit in place and the whole house is toasty … the low airflow in the family room kind of sucks. So we put a borescope into the vent. Couldn’t see well enough to figure out what was going on. We put a bright flashlight & Elph camera into the vent & took some pictures – sure enough, there’s a metal piece halfway across the ducting right up by the trunk.

Now there’s an obvious answer (cut something), but I googled dampers behind hard surfaces / ceilings / etc. Got a lot of “cut it”, but even more “call a professional” … not quite sure what a professional is going to do that’s different (apart from possibly repairing the drywall). We tried to come up with some way to feed a flexible but stiff long something into the vent to shove the damper aside … couldn’t think of anything. So we gave up and cut drywall.

This is *not* where you should put adjustment levers — and it isn’t like the lever is on top where the drywaller didn’t realize it was there. The lever is pressed into the drywall like they had to shove on the board to get it attached.