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Is my fiberglass ductwork lining improperly installed?

I have a question. I live in an 1 bedroom apartment in a prewar apartment building. A year and a half ago they installed a Goodman GKS9 gas furnace with a CAPF cased indoor coil on top. Out of the unit comes six 6”wide ducts that go into each room of the apartment. The distances of the ducts are from 6feet to 10feet. The return air duct is in our hallway. There is an air filter behind the removable grate. Inside there is a stainless steel duct connecting the air filter to the Goodman unit where the fan resides. Lining this duct is 1” thick acoustic fiberglass duct liner. This unit I have on almost all the time. Two things I was told by a neighbor the day I moved in, 1) the units dry the air too much, and 2) the fan is too high. The problem is that in the 6 months I have been living here, I have been noticing black “dust’ EVERYWHERE.

My girlfriend and I ended up cleaning up this black “dust” everyday due to the incredible accumulation. Wipe the bathroom counter clean, and by night there’s another layer. My girlfriend began having bloody noses and sinus problems regularly. We got a humidifier for the bedroom thinking her symptoms may be due to the dry air, yet she continued to have medical issues, so bad a doctor wanted her to get a cat scan. I started developing symptons in december where my sinuses felt blocked even though I wasn’t sick. We examind the black dust under a microscope and saw that is consisted of black, red, and clear glassy fiborous hairs. They were all over the apartment. On our bedding, in our clothing, on our plates and cups.

Not making any sense to me, I opened grate to the return air duct, and took off the air filter. I saw that the installers had lined the duct with fiberglass duct liner and that all edges of this liner were exposed. Putting two and two together I realized that the black dust we were cleaning everyday, and now I had realized we were breathing in and even eating due to its being pumpd out of our air ducts day and night, was fiberglass! We have done numerous tests to confirm that the black “dust” is in fact the fiberglass being sucked out of the acoustic liner from the open edges. We have samples of this. We have appointments with a doctor to check us for our symptoms. We have contacted the contractor who basically blew us off.

This week we called the town building inspector and the health department and they came over with a team to look at the situation. They said that the contactors who installed the equipment were “clowns” and the building inspector is arranging for a meeting with the contractor and building manager tommorow. I spoke with a professional cleaning company, and the president, a chemical engineer, said it’s a serious issue, that our apartment being caked in these glass fibers needs to be evacuated and everything needs to be sanitized or thrown out. It’s a mess. We are still here, though not turning on the heating of course. It’s all over us and in us. There are children who live in this building. We have examined two other apartments and this appears to be a building-wide problem.

This gets to the crux of my question. I am not educated in the field of heating and ductwork installations, but this is what I have been able to surmise thus far:

1)calling the goodman company, I was informed that the furnace fan runs at 1200CFM

2)the town building inspector said when he was here the other day that the fans the contractor “clowns” have used were too powerful for the size of these apartments

3)I calculated that 1200 CFM = 6111 FPM for the 6” ducts used in our apartment

4)the NAIMA requires that anything over 4000 FPM requires metal nosing on upstream edges of insulation (not done in our case, no edges were sealed at all, insulation being exposed at all edges)

5)that 6000 FPM is the MAXIMUM velocity allowed for this type of insulation material

I believe that the insulation they used should not have been used based on my calculations, which did not take into account “loss factor”.

Do you factor in loss factor in deciding whether to use this insulation material or is the fact that on its face the FPM is 6111 and that particular fiberglass lining should NOT HAVE BEEN USED at all?? Being that I calculated the FPM at 6111 and the maximum velocity allowed for this fiberglass duct liner is 6000FMP, numbers matter.

Secondly, isn’t it correct that at the very least, being that the FPM is 6111 or so, and 4000FPM being the guidline number, that all exposed edges of the fiberglass lining should have been sealed??

Any answers to these questions would be appreciated. We feel violated for having lived with this situation for this long, having fiberglass inside of your body and all over everything in your living space at this level is a disturbing experience. Getting professional opinions would mean a lot to us both.

Thank you in advance,

Jason W.