Ellinor Village was built for vacationers in 1949. The air conditioning came later, and it shows.

A 1949 resort, then a neighborhood

Ellinor Village opened in 1949 as a family resort on the mainland near Granada Boulevard: rows of small concrete-block cottages and duplexes, a central pool and clubhouse, built for a two-week stay rather than a lifetime. By the late 1950s and 60s the cottages were being sold off as homes, and the resort became one of Ormond Beach’s first true mid-century neighborhoods. It still reads that way: low rooflines, slab floors, block walls, and small lots on quiet streets a few minutes from the river and the shops on Granada.

For an air conditioning company, the important part is that nothing here was built with ductwork in mind. The houses were cooled by windows, ceiling fans and the shade of the oaks. Everything since has been a retrofit.

Four generations of cooling in one house

Walk a block in Ellinor Village and you will see every answer owners have come up with:

1. The window units from the 1960s and 70s, some still in the openings, most replaced.
2. The 1980s-90s central air retrofit, with a small air handler squeezed into a hall closet or a utility room and flex duct snaked through a shallow attic or, in some cottages, through ducts cast into the slab.
3. The 2000s replacement that reused the retrofit’s duct and closet, often with a bigger unit than the house needed, which is why so many of these homes run clammy.
4. The renovation-era ductless system, increasingly common as the cottages are opened up and enlarged, especially in the duplexes where each side wants its own control.

Which generation you have determines what we can do and what it will cost.

What the retrofits get wrong

The hall-closet air handler is the Ellinor Village signature, and it comes with a predictable list. The return grille is on the closet door and too small, so the system is starved for air and the blower works harder than it should. The drain line exits through a block wall with little slope and clogs every September. The duct runs in the low attic were sized for a smaller system than the one installed in the 2000s, so the house cools unevenly and the unit short-cycles, leaving the humidity behind.

Where the ducts are in the slab, there is a further question: after a wet summer, slab ducts in a 1950s house can hold water. We test them before we trust them, and where they fail the test we abandon them rather than clean them.

What we recommend, cottage by cottage

• Keep the ducted system, fix the return. For a cottage with a dry attic and sound duct, enlarging the return and adding a float switch solves most complaints for the least money.
• Right-size at replacement. A load calculation on a 1,100-square-foot block cottage usually comes back smaller than what is sitting in the closet. A smaller, two-stage unit runs longer, dries the air and costs less to buy.
• Go ductless. For slab-duct cottages, for duplexes, and for any renovation that opens the floor plan, a ductless multi-head system frees the closet, ends the duct question and gives each room its own setting. It also qualifies for FPL’s high-efficiency rebate when the equipment meets the program’s ratings.
• Heat is the same equipment; the heat pump handles the few January nights that dip toward the 48-degree normal low, and a gas furnace rarely earns its place in a house this size.

Cook’s covers Ellinor Village from the Palm Coast headquarters, with the phone answered around the clock and no surcharge for a night or weekend call.