My GF has a nice house, built in 1906. The original part is a square, two stories tall with two rooms per floor. At some point a one-level addition added a master bedroom and a kitchen, then later another addition added a bathroom. That last addition was probably in the 1990s; previously, the toilet and shower were in the basement.

Anyway, the place has forced air heating and central air conditioning. While the upstairs stays nicely warm in the winter, it becomes brutally hot in the summer, even while the AC is keeping the ground floor nicely cool. I finally figured out what is going on– the house only has a single return vent, and it is on the ground floor!

Installing a return vent on the upper floor is very doable, but it would require taking down a bunch of walls, which I'm not about to do as a weekend project. So file it in the "long term plans" folder.

I have also considered putting together a kludge, with 15-20 feet of flexible ducting attached at one end to a box fan. The duct would run from the hot upstairs down the staircase to the solitary return vent.

Posted by: Boviate at 05:11 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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