After requesting a copy, plus a meeting with the guy who did the J manual calculations, our builder informed us that they had spec'd the wrong house! The builder was planning on having the duct work installed next week! We have asked him to hold off on that until we have the J manual results which we are getting independently through a Trane dealer. (not the builder's Rheem guy) The Trane rep did a walk through of our whole house and unvented attic and took a copy of house plans. Should have results next week sometime.

Thanks Klem - I'll do some more homewk, but I am also thinking of getting a service all done. There was some condensation leaking from the plenum box where the coil resides. I think the primary line was clogged, but since I poured some 50-50 bleach/H20 down into the primary line, it cleared out the line. The primary line empties into the P-trap of the upstairs bathroom sink. The sink drain was clogged w what looked like puke and other pieces of solid debris, I plunged it clean to make the drain clear qkly, but then the funk went straight down to the master bathroom downstairs which is right under the sink that was clogged. The whole sink [and worse this was my wife's side] was almost full to the top. I plunged multiple times and only brought up more funk, so I removed w plastic cup a lot of the water and funk. Plunged again and more stuff came up - nothing draining. Went and bought a Rigid Augur and tried clearing sink, but also went to shower drain and removed a whole cat worth of hair...augured this drain, then augured wife's sink. Still no draining in wife's sink. Poured a whole bottle into each shower drain and sink drain..left for 30 min's and poured 3-5gal of hot water in each drain..all went down well. My sink across from hers was never a prob, nor the spa. Put all drains back together, went upstairs in attic and poured bleach/H2O into primary line again and had daughter listen to where it empties into P-trap of upstairs bathroom sink...It flowed well, AND no more issues w any drains of master [sink or shower] not working well. The water pan below the unit in question had a lot of water in it, but not enough to drain out of the secondary drain line. I will go upstairs each day to make sure pan is evaporating....the never ending joys of home ownership...AC down here is important, even in winter. :) Thanks, tstex

Update: the roofer came back and checked all of the gutters and confirmed that there is no drain pipe outlet into the gutters, but we couldn't figure out where the drain pipe ended up. However, he did find an old downspout tucked away in a weird spot in the soffit, and removed a large clog from that, so I started the AC again just to see if the water would start draining there. It did not, but water did start dripping from another area of the soffit (halfway around the house from the unit!). Anyway, it was obvious that we weren't going to get any answers without an expert. So I called in an AC guy, who quickly figured out that the drain pipe runs down into the basement (why go all the way from the attic to the basement instead of out into the gutter?), and that it was badly clogged. He blasted out the clog and added a union so we can easily shop vac it ourselves now and again, and all was well. He also installed the overflow emergency switch that the previous owners left sitting (unconnected) in the drip pan. Grrr... The relationship between the soffit/gutter work and the leak is still a mystery. It could be coincidental, but my guess is that the drainage pipe has been clogged for quite some time, and the only reason we didn't have a major indoor leak before now is because the water was seeping into the soffit and slowly draining through all of the holes that the roofer patched (in addition to some large holes in corners/dormers, he also patched about a million small carpenter bee holes). Regardless, all the water is now going where it belongs, thank goodness! I've got a dehumidifier running in the rooms that got wet, and I'm hoping we can get away with just repainting the ceiling rather than replacing all of the drywall. I do worry about what might be growing inside those soffits, though - the gutter guy said a ton of water and debris came out of the old downspout, so I can only imagine there's more where that came from. Thanks for your guidance as always!

The apparent contradiction of cooling inadequacy vs. heating sufficiency is not a contradiction at all. It is basic physics and it can not be messed with. If you have the heat transfer rates and capacities/contributions of both heating and cooling appliances arithmetic will make sense of it. I specify contribution because you need to know if they are operating up to their rated capacity. Condition of the ducts also contributes, to both heating and cooling as you pointed out. Of course, and the calculations involving existing construction vs. new construction is sometimes challenging due to unknowns in the old stuff. Rather than estimates of heat transfer using assumptions about the construction, you can do better with fuel use rates. You should be able to get real heat contribution from the furnace and fuel use records (and heating degree days) from the coldest weeks of the year when space heating makes hot water and cooking insignificant. You also need to know the efficiency of the furnace. An energy rater or engineer should be able to use that data to calculate the heat transfer rates of the structure. (BTU in must equal BTU out.) Those rates can also be used for heat transfer in the other direction in the summer. Those calculations can be done today. You have fuel use records and you can get degree days from a nearby weather station. It is somewhat less common to use energy use of the cooling appliance for estimates, but it should work just as well. You need to separate electricity use by installing a separate meter and the contribution of humidity removal will have to be factored in. That means that you'd have to record humidity inside and outside and include that in the calculation. It is likely that you have sufficient capacity for you furnace or it is oversized whereas the cooling capacity is not adequate if your cooling unit is functioning properly. Again, calculations will tell you. How do you fix it? Better insulation on the ducts, structure envelope and better sealing of both will always cost less in the long run than installing a larger appliance. Bringing the ducts indoors is also a good idea as pointed out by mike_home. Don't think of active fans if you consider better attic ventilation. It needs to be passive. it is difficult, however, to draw enough air through an attic to make much of a difference in its temperature. Most of the heat transfer into the living space is due to re-radiation of heat from the underside of the roof deck. That is why radiation barriers were so "hot" for a time. The trouble with them is that they get dirty and lose effectiveness pretty quickly. It was a nice idea, but did not work as expected.