If I put a box over the heat vent in the kitchen and over the living room, might not heat those rooms as much. Save a buck on energy?
Anyone tried this?
Gonna be below zero tonight, and windy. My heat bill will be up a bit, or a lot.
Yeah
A few years back I closed the vents totally to two rooms and just kept the doors closed and saved money.
Thank you. I don't have any way to compare open or closed vents, but I'll try it.
Can you close the ductwork closer to the furnace? That would probably be better than just a box over the vent.
Is there a cold air return in those rooms? I closed the vents to an unused bedroom then realized I was sucking 60° air back down to the furnace through the cold air return. That's not very efficient. I made a cover from a rubber pad and put a heavy box in front of the return to stop it from sucking air.
Yes, years ago and I'm still doing it. Well, I close the vent using the lever that does that. I assume I'm saving money to the extent parts of the house (that I don't use much) are colder than they would be. The basement is definitely colder. In fact maybe I should open the vent since now I have the computer down here and I'm here so much. I have the spare bedroom door closed, a towell under its door, and the vent closed, and it's definitely cooler in that room. Never gets cold I think. Maybe heat goes through the door and the walls. Etc .
I've been told, here probably, that if I close too many, that will cause combustion problems with my oil furnace, but now that I think about it, that makes little or no sense. The air I'm preventing from circulating is not the combustion air. That comes in somewhere (????) and goes out the chimney.
The air I'm stopping is the air on the other side of the heat exchanger. If that circulates less, I suppose it gets hotter while it's in the furnace, but not so hot it's going to heat the fire chamber** and change the combustion characteristics of the oil fire.
**That is, fail to cool the fire chamber as much. It will do that a little, but it's already so hot in the middle of an atomized oil fire, I don't think it will change anything.I can't.
No. The first two houses I lived in were built right and had that, but I only have two air returns, one close to the celing of the second floor in the stairwell, and one close to the floor of the basement in the same stairwell. The second is only about an 18 inche duct ride to the furnace input.
No doors to close off the stairs, or separate the living room from the dining "area" or the hall from the kitchen. But it makes a small house look and feel bigger when heat and AC are not a consideration.
Not good, for sure, but not so much the part where you reheat 60* air. That just makes it easier to heat. I think the problem that was bad, or worse, was heating the room you intended to be cool
V. Good.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. In reverse order, why do you think something was heating the room I was intending to be cool? The heat ducts were closed at the furnace. No heat was blowing into the room. It was definitely cool in that room, sometimes into the mid-50?s during the coldest days.
As far as the return air, why would I want to mix 55° - 60° air in with the
68° degree from the rest of the house and then reheat it? Why isn't that a bad thing?
Because you were sucking heated air through the room on its way to the retrun duct. It says 60° , which I presume is my computers version of 60 degree. I dind't pay attention to that, but how could it be that cold if it came from the heated part of your house. I get it. The room was 60, but when you sucked out the 60 degree air it was replaced with 67 degree air from the rest of the house, so that's warming the room, and cooling part of the return air. .
I don't know if you want to but isn't that what happens when the cold air duct was sucking air out of the room. That air was replaced with air from the rest of the house, right?
Or from leaks around the windows I guess. if that was most of it, then I'm mostly wrong.
So from which entryway, both of which were intended to be close, is leaking air into the room more.
When I posted, I thought -- and it still may be the case afaik -- that the air was 60 because it cooled off in the unheated room (while heating the room) and it had been 67 say, because it came from the heated rooms. I figure you have to reheat the air no matter where it came from, but the problem was that it was 60, and that happened in the unheated room.
So now I don't know where the return air from that room comes from, the rest of hte house or the outside.
Sorry for the confusion.
if you put a box, and it would be quite a big box, over the living room you wouldn't be able to get in or out
Hah. You Yanks really are in the dark ages,like a hundred years behind the rest of civilisation. My house needs no heating most of the Winter I have two feet of insulation in the walls. The TV and freezers keep the place warm
If you had a non-primitive heating system, the combustion air would be drawn from outside the building directly into the furnace/boiler, not drawn through the house. (Balanced flue/room sealed)
If you close off your combustion air vents, you risk carbon monoxide poisoning.
You need to catch up with the rest of the world.
In my case, the return air vent is in the hall. If I close a vent in one of the two small bedrooms, there will be no air flow.
The evidence of it working, is that rooms are colder, and heat bill goes down. Hard to compare heat bill, but got to figure it's doing some thing.
He's talking about the return air vents for a forced air furnace, which has nothing to do with combustion air, idiot.
Just all the hot air that comes out of your mouth would keep you warm anywhere.
Sigh. Less than 24 hours, and look where the conversation has gone. Will you kids learn to play nice?
Just so that there is no misunderstanding, my cold air returns are not my "combustion air vents".
While I do draw combustion air from inside the house, it is drawn in right at the furnace through a dedicated inlet pipe.
Closing a cold air return in an unheated room won't impact the combustion air intake.
Another misunderstanding.
I said at the top that I assume I'm saving money.
For just this reason.
I too can't really tell if the cost has gone down because I didnt' keep records before I closed the vents, and I'd have to keep track of degree days from one year to the next and gallons of oil delivered and it's too much effort.
When I say at the end I don't think it will change anything, I mean I don't think it will change the character of an oil (or gas) fire to either make the air in the house dirtier or make more carbon monoxide, or something else I wouldn't like. DD3 says the same thing, iiuc. But someone here in the last 15 years once said it would, and iirc no one posted a disagreement.
...snip...
Just for the record, I don't recall making any comments related to dirty air or carbon monoxide.
No, but it MAY cause the furnace to "short cycle" because the plenum temperature will rize too high due to restricted air flow. This causes the high limit switch to shut off the burner untill the blower sucks the heat out of the heat exchanger, when it will relight. This makes the efficiency of the furnace drop SIGNIFICANTLY.
Heat can go into one of a couple places. Into the house, into the cellar, up the chimney. When efficiency drops SIGNIFIGANTLY, the heat is lost some where.
So the burner shuts off, and the blower still runs. How does this make the furnace less EFFICIENT? I don't picture it. Shutting off the gas lowers the efficiency? Really?
At church we have converted oil furnaces, which now run NG. They have a high limit sensor in the discharge air, when it gets to 110 or 120 it turns off the flame. The three blowers keep running.
So, turning off the gas now and again makes the efficiency of the furnace drop SIGNIFICANTLY? How's that, again?
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