Return To Sender

Hey everybody, welcome back and TGIF!! We made it through another hurricane season, the holidays are upon us and guest bedrooms are the hot (pun intended) topic of the day. The holidays most always bring friends and family in from somewhere to celebrate all the blessings and joy that the holiday season brings us. As South Floridians, I think we are even more popular for holiday travel as all our up north folks are looking to get out of the wind, ice and snow. How does this tie into hot rooms you ask?

We all have a guest bedroom or two in the house that probably gets very little use most of the year. The travel season hits, and Aunt Mildred and Uncle Jerry fly in from Montana to spend a couple weeks, and after the first night they tell you how hot the guest room was and how difficult it was to sleep in there. They woke up sweating at two in the morning and it only got worse as the night went on. It seems to get even worse after they closed the door is the other thing they cheerfully share with you over the first cup of coffee out on the veranda. Sound familiar?

If your home was built before 2006, I can say with confidence that the problem is a lack of return air in the room in question. As with everything we constantly strive for better and better, this is the case in air conditioning design as well. In today’s construction all bedrooms in a home have active or passive return air. (Active return is ducted directly back to the air handler, passive return are things like pass through grills above doors or jumper ducts going from room to room to allow air movement) If you look at the physics of air conditioning the science will tell you that you can take all the cold air in the universe and dump it into a room, if you are not pulling the warm air back out of the area, it will never cool correctly. Humidity is going to stack in that room, and again, closing the door makes the problem worse as it reduces airflow even further.

Fortunately, this is usually a relatively easy problem to correct, again depending on where the air handler is located and how much room we have to work with to increase the air circulation in the trouble spots. Again, I can say with confidence that 99 times out of 100 adding return air to a room or rooms that are not cooling correctly will make it better or solve it 100%.

That said, as always give us a ring at 1-800-475-1504, or visit www.artplumbingandac.com to have one of our comfort specialist stop by the house for a complimentary duct & comfort evaluation. We can make those hot rooms go away. Once again feel free to drop me an email at THW@artplumbingandac.com for any questions you may have or if you have a topic you would like me to expand on.

House Whisperer out!!