Folks, I am an everyday home owner in a northern Florida city who needs your expert advice. I gets darn hot here in the summer, and here is my problem.
I have a ~12 ft x 17 ft backroom that in the afternoon still gets about 5-6 degrees warmer than the rest of the house. I have tried various options over the past 5 years, each seems to have helped some, but each of these improvements may have been somewhat offset by more powerful and hotter PCs we have put in that room.
The cause of the problem seems to be a combination of the unshaded afternoon sun and 2 PCs in that back room.
So far, we have tried to solve the problem by:
- Adding a 2d AC vent to the room
- Adding a return air vent to the room
- Increasing the size of the duct pipes (it's that foil-coated flexible stuff) to the AC vents and to the return air
- Touching up the blown attic insulation especially above that room
- Piping much of the hot air from the 3.0 ghz PC out through a pipe fitted to a window-inserted pipe (my wife loves the look -- argh!)
I also planted a couple of shade trees, but I might die of old age before they produce dome good shade.
All this has already cost us several hundred dollars (maybe up to about a thousand by now) and the problem persists, tho apparently somewhat less that it would be.
Originally the difference in temperature in this room and the rest of the house was about 5 degrees, and I originally thought it was totally due to the PCs but a couple of weeks ago, I had all the PCs off all day and there was still about a 3-4 degree difference between that room and the rest of the house by late afternoon. After adding the exhaust pipe from the 3.0 ghz PC, the latest PCs (faster and hotter than a few years ago!) seem to add about a 2 degree difference, whereas before the pipe, the difference was more like 4 degrees for Pcs.
Current options that have been presented to us by some locals are the following:
- Adding a fan to inside the duct-piping that branches to this room to force more cool air to it
- Adding a powered ventilator to the attic, which might (?) also help preserve the life of the roof
- Adding a (collection?) box in the attic to the 2 boxes that are already there so that the ducts going to this room have their own box
Restrictive covenants prohibit adding a window AC unit.
Here are some specs on the home: Back room is ~12 ft x 17 ft Home is ~2150 AC'd sq ft Back room has 2 PCs (a 866 ghz and a 3.0 ghz) Home was new in 1996, when we moved in
3-sided brick, with the back-side hardy-board. The brick side that gets afternoon sun is almost 20 ft high (built on hill) Afternoon sun is unshaded and the back room is on that side of the house AC unit is a Carrier heat-pump and cools the rest of the house fineYour thoughts most appreciated!