HVAC Heatercore duct.

Im sure this idea is so obvious that many people have tried it, or know that it is for some reason (possibly condensation sub-ambient) not feasible. Currently I'm in the dorm at Uni, but next year will be getting an apartment off campus, and as soon as that opportunity presents itself, I believe I will mount a suitable HC to the HVAC inlet for my individual room and tamper with the thermostat as to create a continuous airflow through that duct.

Will this end badly? Surely amazing deltaT's between rad air and rad water could be achieved, and if one could optimize the central air to maintain a constant stream at a set ambient... it would be ideal. I am lucky, however, that the particular block of apartments I will inhabit are "utilities included," so running the AC 24/7 wont be an expense at all.

Of course I will be at the mercy of temporary outages to the larger HVAC system, but for that we have auto shutdown temps, and I have also been reading up about relays and circuitry over on procooling and am visualizing an emergency backup pulling (opposite the wall mount) 2x120's.

My thinking tells me that since ambient will be whatever is going through the rad initially, there will be no sub ambient loop issues. If condensation occurs I expect it will be confined to the HC, which will be outside of the box. Hopefully such a setup will cruise a few degrees above ambient only.

I am most likely going to be moving in with my girlfriend, and so I even have a fertile test bed for this idea, and as my excitement grows I am more and more inclined to devote next saturday to this endeavor.

Do I err? Is this a long debunked scenario in watercooling? Is the average airflow from the average HVAC duct below 40CFM or similarly too low to cool a HC effectively? I have some sneaking suspicion that more people would be doing and talking about this if it were viable.

Let me know.

been there done that.
it can actually work fairly well. If you mount it to the vent and then have some 120s pulling air, it will get plenty of cold air thru it.

if you run into condensation probs, increase the size of your reservoir. I did that and with my AC kicking on and off, I still had a decent amount of chilled liquid in the res but it never got so cold as to cause condensation issues once I tweaked the amount of liquid + adjusted the standoff between the vent and the core. If you spend enough time messing with it, you can get it setup to where it will hold ambient or maybe a degree or two below depending on how much your ac is running.