Have you observed recently when you get in a room in your house, it seems colder than the others? Regardless of how you set your thermostat, some rooms are always hotter or colder than the others. Your bedroom may be the exact temperature you expected, but your living room is chilling. While these temperature disparities are aggravating, they may be indicators of more complex problems.
Before you seek professional help, examine these common issues:
- When your air ducts are compressed or twisted, certain parts of your house can’t get enough air. Air duct leaks can also lead to unstable temperatures, among other problems.
- Clean air filters allow efficient airflow through your home. When your air filters are filthy, it blocks airflow, thus affecting the amount of fresh air to circulate around your home.
- Fresh air from your unit can escape out of open windows resulting in unstable temperatures in your home.
- When a vent remains sealed in a room, it blocks airflow resulting in a warmer temperature than in other parts of the house.
When none of the problems is spotted, the next possible cause is an unstable air conditioning and heating system. At this point, you will already need a professional technician to correct the imbalance in your unit.
There are several factors that can result in an imbalanced HVAC system. During the installation, larger air ducts and additional supply vents push more air into the rooms. Dampers are also set up, which help manage the airflow and stabilize the temperature in every part of your house. These are valves that enable you to regulate the amount of air getting to the rooms of the house. They are set up near the internal unit of the AC unit on the main ducts, often in a closet.
When your air ducts and dampers are correctly installed, your HVAC system should be stable; however, there are some factors that can affect this stability. Here are the 8 reasons why temperature in your house is unstable:
Poor Insulation
This is most common in old houses, but in any case, poor insulation and thin walls can negatively affect the overall temperature in your house. When your home doesn’t keep the heat or cool air, you will end up squandering energy and exerting more effort to condition the entire house. Although this is only an issue of specific rooms, you will be running your system longer than its maximum operation to heat and cool them, which can be costly over time.
Room Usage
The way you use the rooms may also result in an unstable HVAC system. A home office is most likely to be warmer because of the equipment running in it generating heat such as computers, servers, and other electronic devices. This can be fixed by hiring an AC technician to regulate the airflow to those warmer rooms by setting up the dampers in the ducts, boosting the amount of cool air into the rooms.
Under or Over-sized Ductwork
If your ductwork or HVAC is the wrong size for your home, you won’t get the airflow you need. Not only will this impact the balance of heating and cooling in your home, but can cause long term damage to your system. In the cold months, improper airflow can cause your system’s evaporator coils to freeze up. In the warm months, the opposite problem occurs: your system can overheat and fail prematurely.
Multi-level Homes
When your house has multiple levels, it can be hard to properly stabilize the air because of the nature of warm air increasing as well as the long duct operations that are needed to get air to every room. If this happens in your house, you may want to consider a zoned AC system. By zoning, your house is divided into different areas, each of which has its separate thermostat and temperature regulator that regulates the dampers in your duct system. This system also allows you to regulate different temperatures for all the rooms, allowing you to balance the temperature in your house.
Inadequate Return Vents
Warm air from the room is pulled by return vents, recycling it into the system to be cooled and circulated. When you have a big house that only has one return vent, it is not enough to sufficiently take in the warm air from distant rooms, thus there is a huge amount of cool air blending with warmer air, raising the temperature in your house. In order to overcome this is to open all the room doors, which can help with returning airflow. If this does not improve the situation, you will have to add more return vents into your house.
Home Renovations
Constructing additional rooms or renovating can dodge your AC systems balance, specifically when walls are installed or removed. This could be a simple fix by adjusting the dampers in your ducts; however, you may also need to run more ducts depending upon the restorations or additions that were completed. Sometimes, you may also need to set up a second air conditioner.
Thermostat Location
Air conditioner thermostats are efficient in regulating the temperature where they are installed. When your thermostat is installed in your living room and when the room gets to the preset temperature, the whole system will stop operating to keep the house from overheating. This occurs whether or not the other parts of the house have been set to the same temperature.
Cooling Unit Location
Naturally, the rooms nearest to your cooling unit will get the most of the conditioned air. The rooms that are far or at the end of the ductwork get far less airflow and may not be equally heated or cooled unlike the rest of the house.
There are several factors that can affect the heating and cooling system of your home. We recommend having a home energy audit to identify the root cause of the problem.
The best solution for you greatly depends on the source, be it environmental or mechanical. Contact 5 Star Air today to help you determine the source of the imbalance and to apply the right solution for your home cooling system. Now is the high time to do it and start dealing with the issues before the summer heat hits!
