Three Ways To Help Your Home Heat More Evenly
Are you tired of some rooms in your home being swelteringly hot, while others seem too cool? In most cases, you don't have to replace your whole HVAC system or rebuild your ductwork in order to heat your home more evenly. Here are three rather simple ways to encourage more even heating.
Make sure your cold air returns are not blocked.
A common cause of uneven heating is blocked cold air returns. If some of the returns are blocked, the system cannot draw cool air back in to reheat, and the rooms with blocked returns tend to get overly chilly. If you have any furniture on top of or in front of your cold air returns, move it. Also, make sure pillows, clothes and toys don't get tossed on top of the returns.
Open all vents, and evaluate.
It's time to do a little analysis. Open all of your heating vents in every room. Then, turn the thermostat up to a reasonable temperature. Let the system run. After an hour or so, go from room to room with a thermometer. In those rooms that are hotter than the temperature that you specified on the thermostat, close the vents partway. This should divert some of the heat from these rooms, so more warm air ends up in the cooler rooms.
Keep doors between the upstairs and downstairs closed.
Hot air rises. On slightly warmer days when your furnace does not kick on as often, there is enough time for the warm air to gather upstairs, leaving your downstairs chilly. When the heat kicks on again, this warm air is redistributed, and then it slowly begins traveling upstairs until the next heat cycle. You can stop this downstairs cooling effect by closing any doors between your upstairs and downstairs. If there are no doors between your floors, consider hanging a thick curtain across the stairway. This will trap the heat on the floor it's released on, helping to keep the temperature even throughout your home.
If there are still rooms that are chillier than others after you try the strategies above, then perhaps there's another explanation for the problem. Are the windows in the cold rooms loose and letting in cold air? Are those rooms poorly insulated? Adding more insulation or caulking in old windows can help. An experienced HVAC technician like one from Allied Mechanical & Electrical, Inc. can examine your home and help you get to the bottom of the problem, if needed.
Share