My house two heating "zones," downstairs with central a/c and oil-fired forced warm air. Upstairs is heat pump. The the air handler and ductwork for our heat pump is in our unfinished attic. We typically only use the upstairs zone during hot or cold extremes, otherwise the downstairs keeps things pretty nice throughout the entire house. During extremes, though, the system struggles. Today we're looking at 95F ambient outside, 105-110F in the attic, and the HP is running non-stop to keep things at 80F inside. I'm betting that it's due to the minimal insulation on the ductwork. The main trunk line in the attic appears to be rectangular duct wrapped in foil-faced fiberglass with a marked R value of R-5.7. There are round duct branches off of that to the rooms that appear to be wrapped in foil-faced bubble wrap. The register boots themselves also have the R-5.7 foil-faced fiberglass. I know that the foil-faced bubble stuff can technically be used as insulation, but proper installation requires spacers to create air gaps, etc. I have no idea if that was done or not, but if I had to guess based on the quality of workmanship elsewhere in the house, I'd say no. There was a partial roll of it left in the attic, too, and it appears to be the thin 1/4" stuff, not the thick 1" stuff. So basically, radiant barrier wrapped around ductwork. I have also noticed during other work in the house that there's some evidence of condensation forming around the register boots and staining the ceiling in spots around the register grills. Would it be a good idea to replace that insulation with foil-faced fiberglass at R-8? The other idea I had is, what about removing the current insulation, building a type of enclosure around the duct, and spray-foaming around the ducts with a 2-component spray foam? It would be expensive, but at nearly R-7 per inch, I could get much higher R-values. What are your thoughts?

I'm not posting to ask how I just wanted to make sure that before I begin the job everything is in proper order. I've watched a few informative videos and am pretty comfortable with the process at this point, however I want to clear up some case dependent details. This is the current layout [IMG]https://s20.postimg.org/ahnira3st/Salim_Vent.jpg[/IMG] (full size) [url]https://postimg.org/image/3r71hugmx/[/url] I've got a closet that houses a dryer and I have to lay ducting through the closet wall then through the exterior wall to the outside. The way I'm picturing it right now is that the ducting will have to lay on the floor of the house? Is that ok? I'm planning on putting an opening in the exterior wall about a foot off the ground, but maybe it's better to plant it near the ceiling, or midway throught? The picture is somewhat to scale so it's not really a long distance that the ducting has to cover before it reaches the wall, about 5ft from the closet, but in any case I just wanted to make sure it's not going to be a safety hazzard, so maybe I can attach it to the wall or something instead? Another thing that is not clear from the picture is that this is the second floor of the house, and the owner got me a really cheap aluminum down facing vent with a flap cover. While all the videos I watched have a staright out exhaust. Should I be concerned with the vent blowing directly at the house's vinyl covers or some other positional issue with venting from second floor. Most videos have it on first floors and just say keep it 12 in from the ground. Thank you, please let me know if you need additional details. Also if anyone knows, what would be a fair price to charge for a job like this?