Gas and Oil Home Heating Furnaces - Cold New house blues

I tend to not be a big fan of newly built spec homes, and here's a good reason why: The brand-new house we just bought has two floors and a partially finished basement, but no zones, no insulation on the ducts, and is about as noisy as a freight train. We might as well use it as an intercom system. No matter how hot the main floor gets, the basement and our second floor master bedroom stay freezing cold. Unfortunately, since we just bought the house, we don't exactly have a lot of money to pour into overhauling the system. I highly doubt that the ductwork was laid out in such a way to allow efficient zoning, but I thought I'd ask anyway, are there any cost-efficient ways of retrofitting the system for zones(without tearing into walls to completely reroute ductwork), and adding some insulation? Any other suggestions for improving this situation? I'm truly frightened to see our gas bill at the end of this month.

Put up with it.I would contact your GC and everybody involved and say "MAKE IT RIGHT".Keep complaining until it is right.If you spent 60K on a new Cadillac with problems what would you do?There are a lot of things YOU could do,but it is not YOUR responsibilty to make things right!!!!Take your own profession,if something is amiss on your end whose, responsibility is it to correct it, to the customers satisfaction?Yours or the customers???????PDF

Get the installing company out there to balance the system. All ya gotta do is call and complain.

That sounds really good, but we did not build the house, it was built by a developer, and there was a previous owner for a short while. The house is actually 2 years old, and I have heard of contractors having a good faith guarantee of a year, and for the first owner, but I think by now it's too late to go back to the developer and say fix this. It's really obvious that the developer put the absolute cheapest possible materials into the house...there are dozens of other things that are in very bad condition for a house that is only two years old. Every single corner bead is cracked. They made a cathedral ceiling in the master bedroom and failed to vent the roof above it, so there are condensation stains on the ceiling. The list goes on. We were aware of that when we bought the house, but not the unbalanced HVAC. Should we contact the inspector that we used before buying the house regarding this issue?

Sorry to say this, You may have gotten a lemon. The previous owners probably got screwed by the builder and hvac people also. Find out who the hvac company and don't ever use them for repairs or upgrades.
As to your original question of retrofitting, etc. First have a heat load calculation done on your home. Your heat and a/c may just be undersized enough to cause the condinsation problems and the exsisting duct work may be able to handle the correct equipment upgrade without getting to involved.

Pull up web site for your state.Go thru index and look for sites and or inspectors that might be able to assisst you.E-mail everyone.Somewhere,someplace you should be able to find some recourse to your problems.E-mail the state attorneys office.I wish you well.Please let the forum know so others may benefit from how you solved this situation.PDF