Articles - Do You Have A "Cold Storage" Room In Your House

		HomePro Systems, Inc.

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Systems Inc.
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Oakwood, Ontario
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Do You Have A "Cold Storage" Room In Your House:

There are rooms all over town that would be great for fur storage, or make good meat lockers, and which are inhabitable only by Siberian Huskies or Polar Bears. Many people are frustrated with rooms in their homes which just never get warm enough and sometimes are down right cold. They usually try to add insulation or storm windows or both. These measures normally fail to cure the problem because they don't really address the cause. The cause is almost always insufficient heat entering the room. Increasing heat to a single room from a central ducted system however is often quite difficult.

Most cold rooms are associated with forced air heating systems.

Forced Air Systems: Forced air systems work by blowing air from the furnace to the rooms through supply ducting and pulling it back via return ducting. It is no easy trick to deliver a balanced amount of warm air to the many different rooms within a house. The main duct or ducts (extended plenums) that carry air away from the furnace must generally be systematically downsized as run-outs to registers tap air from them. Usually the plenum should be downsized after three or four taps. This is to maintain a consistent air pressure inside the plenum to ensure delivery through the entire system.

Balance: For an individual room to heat properly it must receive enough heated air to keep up with the losses through windows, and wall, floor, and ceiling surfaces. When it gets colder outside, the heating system runs longer to keep up with the increased losses. Larger rooms with more window surface and greater exposure require more incoming heated air. The air volume to a particular room (assuming a uniform plenum pressure) is controlled by the size and number of the runout ducts to the room. Systems must be flexible enough to work adequately with both heat and air conditioning. The typical two story house requires 2/3 of the total air volume to reach the second floor during air conditioning season (the cold air tends to fall back to the first level) and 2/3 of the heated air on the first floor during the heating season (heated air tends to rise to the second floor).

Balancing The System: To balance a system to accommodate the seasons, individual room register dampers are adjusted to lessen or increase the air volume entering the rooms. Some systems have dampers built into extended plenums or main ducts serving individual levels of the house. Cold rooms may simply be out of balance with the rest of the house. Make sure that the registers are fully open and that no plenum damper is shut. If there is very little air coming out of a register, unscrew it and put your hand into the duct to see if there is a blockage. (Rags, pop bottles, and sheet metal pieces are often found.) If there is no blockage and you still get little air, try closing other registers to see if that increases the air flow. Occasionally ducts are not connected or just barely so. Look down the duct run-out with a strong flashlight and a mirror.

Typical Balance Problems: Frequently too much air enters the room containing the thermostat and not enough reaches the cold room. The thermostat responds to its room temperature and turns the furnace off before the cold room can be adequately heated. Adjust the registers in the room with the thermostat to restrict the flow. A thermostat in the air path may also respond this way. Sometimes thermostats have to be shielded or moved.
More Significant Problems

Slab Houses: Houses built on concrete slabs (no basement or crawlspace) often have furnaces which push air down and through ducts within the slab. If the furnace is located in the center of the house there is usually no readily noticed problem; but houses with the furnace at one end will often have a cold room at the opposite end. Usually insufficient air reaches the room and the air that does is often quite a bit cooler. The best solution in such a case often is to add an electric baseboard heater to boost the heat. If the room is poorly air conditioned as well, consider a through-the-wall heatpump.

Renovations: Renovated three story townhouses with heating and cooling equipment located on the roof almost always have cold first floors. It is very difficult to force warm air (it just loves to rise) down three stories. If the first floor registers are located in the ceiling, the warmed air never reaches the floor. The small amount of warm air that reaches the first floor registers travels along the ceiling back to the return. The result is often a very cold floor. Strategically placed electric baseboards are often a practical answer here too. You will find the first floor quite cool in the summer. (The colder AC air just loves to fall.)

Finished Basements: Some finished basements never seem to get adequately warm. The usual reason is that the original ducting was designed to heat the upper levels of the house only. Heat registers to the basement were probably cut into the extended plenum for the first floor and empty to the ceiling. This lowers the pressure within the entire system disrupting the
flow of air throughout the entire house. Recognize that heating the basement is at the expense of the upper level heating. Close the basement registers when you are not using the basement.

Additions: Some poorly planned additions utilize the original registers where the addition meets the old exterior of the house. The results are usually quite poor. Heat from original registers usually responds to inner returns and won't travel to the outer walls of the new addition. It is usually better to extend register ducts directly from the plenum to the outer wall of the new addition or install a separate through-the-wall heatpump. Tapping existing duct systems to heat and cool additions is almost always a bad idea.

Hot Water Systems: Cold rooms with radiators or baseboards are usually easily cured. The reason there is no heat is that water is not moving through the radiator or baseboard. This is almost always due to an air blockage, a faulty inlet valve, or a badly adjusted balance valve. Sometimes there just isn't enough water in the system.

Check the system by running the thermostat up and pinpointing which radiators or baseboards are not heating. If there are multiple thermostats make sure they are all turned up and that the corresponding circulators or zone valves are working. Touch the circulators and feel for the vibration. Put your hands on the pipes on both sides of zone valves (little boxes with thin wires leading from them mounted across pipes above the boiler) to see if the hot water is flowing through them. (There is usually a little slide on zone valves which allows for manual operation.) If the only radiators or baseboards are on upper levels, check the boiler pressure gauge. It should typically show 12 to 14 pounds of pressure since that is usually what the feed valve is set at. If there is less than this the feed valve may not be operating and the heating system may not be filled with water.

Check individual radiators or baseboards by first making sure that inlet valves are open and that the radiator or baseboard is adequately bled. Locate the bleed valve on one end and open it. Allow all air to hiss out and wait for water to flow. (Have a coffee can or cup ready to catch the water.) If air hisses out and then stops and no water flows, the system is probably low on water. Tighten the bleed valve and wait (with the system operating) for about a half hour and then try it again. Bleed it until you get water. If you can't get water, the system feed valve is probably faulty. Call a plumber.

Adding an Air Bleed Valve: Long runs of copper baseboards sometimes have air blockages which are very difficult to bleed off. Consider tapping the baseboard with a "saddle valve" at the opposite end from the existing bleed valve. Saddle valves clamp around the pipe and pierce the tubing by tightening them down. They cost less than three dollars and anybody can install them.

Cool Rooms: Occasionally baseboard systems (crawl space houses) have a cool room on the end of the run of baseboard. This is usually due to excessive temperature loss and is often cured by insulating connecting pipes beneath the floor. Use 3 1/2 inch fiberglass insulation with a foil backing (foil to the outside) wrapped and taped around the pipes with duct tape.
Sometimes the boiler water temperature is simply too low. Radiator systems usually run at 140 degrees F. while baseboard systems usually run at 160 to 180 degrees F. There is usually an adjustment on the front of the boiler.

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