How to Fix Uneven Heating and Cooling

LESLIE: Now we’re heading out to California where Carol is dealing with a heating situation. Tell us what’s going on.

CAROL: I bought a home – a brand-new home. And the air-conditioning unit and heating unit is above my bedroom and so it gets major heat and air conditioning. But the front room is vaulted and the two bedrooms on the opposite side of the house are regular – flat – like my bedroom roof. And the heat doesn’t seem to distribute very good, because the bedrooms and the front room are on the cool side, where my bedroom will be hot if you have the heater on or opposite with the air conditioning. And I’m wondering if there’s something I can have done to make that better.

TOM: Possibly. It sounds like the HVAC system was not properly designed. I’m going to presume that everything that was designed to work, in terms of ducts not being restricted and that sort of thing, is working. But what you’re describing is, unfortunately, a very common condition caused exclusively by an improper or inadequate HVAC design. Because you have to really design how much air goes into every part of the house and how much air comes back from the return and what path that air takes on the way back. It’s not just a matter of dumping air out; you have to take it back so it can be recooled and reheated.

And so if you’re having such an enormous problem with inconsistency of temperature throughout the house, then I think you need to get a really good-quality HVAC contractor in there to try to figure out why that’s happening and what you can reasonably do within the guidelines of the structure you have right now without doing a lot of demolition to walls to add more heat or cooling, add more air supply, into those rooms. Because, obviously, you don’t have enough and that’s what’s making you so uncomfortable.

But not just – we’re not just calling – we’re not just talking about calling a guy for a service of your heating system now. We need a real technician that understands HVAC duct layout, can do a heat-loss calculation for your house and figure out where it’s gone wrong and what it’s going to take to fix it.

CAROL: OK. Thank you very much.

LESLIE: You are tuned to The Money Pit Home Improvement Radio Show on air and online at MoneyPit.com. Now you can call in your home repair or your home improvement question 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at 1-888-MONEY-PIT.