Lack of heat

Looking for a bit of advice for my forced air gas heating. Currently only my garden floor is getting adequate air- the rest of the house is literally freezing. The garden floor heat is pretty powerful to the point of being too hot while the upper floors have barely any air flow at all. One gas furnance is being used for the entire house. Thoughts?

bedstuyreno

in About Brooklyn 9 years and 11 months ago

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anotherposter | 9 years and 11 months ago

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We were having a similar problem with forced hot air in a 3 story brownstone with a cellar. We had many problems leading to this and many fixes, but if yours is just that it’s unbalanced, get an HVAC company in to help. I have a maintenance contract with All HVAC and they come out twice a year and check on things and change filters. The garden level usually has a much lower ceiling in brownstones so needs less heat going there in the first place, so closing vents on that floor could help (depending on how it is delivered). We were planning to do a fair amount of work anyway (including the windows) so it was easy to add in some of these fixes. Problems identified in our case: 1\. The furnace itself really wasn’t adequate for the house size (something we heard time and again starting with our pre-purchase inspection) 2\. Our windows were old and in terrible shape so we were losing a lot of heat from them, esp on upper floors that had more windows (and some on the garden level had already been replaced) 3\. The vents/ductwork. We didn’t have enough. The previous owner that converted the house from rads to forced air just went with the existing vents from some ancient heating system–just two lines of vents up one side of the house, meaning many rooms didn’t have vents. Also, the ductwork in the cellar from the furnace was very shoddy and no amount of duct tape could fix it–that meant that lots of heat was lost in the cellar, which seemed to be a sort of floor heat for the garden level. There was very little separating these two levels–you could see through the holes in the floor. Our changes: 1\. We upgraded the furnace when doing other work. Lots of time was spent by the HVAC guys balancing the system. 2\. We replaced the windows (again, we had planned to do that anyway when we bought)-leaves could blow in some. 3\. Other projects were so messy and we were living in the space so we ended up scrapping the vent overhaul for our own sanity. Some of the work at least allowed for improving the ductwork in the cellar where the unit is and the buffer between it and the garden level. Results: awesome. We no longer have to run the furnace constantly to keep the house warm. With our limited ductwork/vents, it couldn’t be perfectly balanced but we just open/close vents to adjust further and that’s something we rarely change once you get it right.

steam_man | 9 years and 11 months ago

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To expand on what e-man said. Your house is not balanced. Hopefully volume dampers were installed in the ducts. If you have access to them then you can adjust the volume of air flowing through each duct, this is called balancing. It is done based on air volume required in a given room and is impossible to do based on temperature alone. If you don’t have volume dampers (look also for a cable coming out of the vent grilles and diffusers), then you will have to install opposable blade dampers at each grille. Expensive and noisy. Just remember the more you close one room the louder that vent will become and the more air you will push down the line.

eman134 | 9 years and 11 months ago

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there should be some adjustable vent dampers that allow you to choke the airflow to the lower floor and open the vent dampers above