Poor Heat Circulation

Is your staircase open to the second floor? I have a similar problem in the summer. My solution was to place a fan at the bottom of the stairs to blow air up to the second floor. The fan I use is a Honeywell turbo fan, about $30 at Target, and it really blows.

You might also check your airflow vents and returns to make sure you are actually moving air through the house. The solution might be more airflow, not less.

You don't offer much in the way of specifics about your heating system. You mentioned you closed the vents upstairs, so is it right to assume you have forced hot air, or did you mean the louvre on the baseboard heating elements?

If hot air, then where is the return for the system?

If you also have whole house A/C, and balancing dampers, perhaps they were set that way (favoring the upstairs) in the summer and you would have to adjust them for winter.

Is the upstairs separate from the downstairs, connected only by a stairwell, or is it open between the 2 floors as with an area of common (cathedral type) ceiling.

Without some relevant and meaningful information on your part, you are far less likely to get specific help.

Greg

1. Inspect all the ducts to make sure that none of the joints broke open.

2. Look for tuning baffles that are closed or could be closed. These are sometimes installed to tune systems. These are like butterfly valves inside the pipes with an adjustment lever. If you don't have any, perhaps you could install some in the upstairs ducts.

3. Closing vents upstairs should make some kind of change, so make sure that your downstairs vents and ducts are not blocked. Generally it is not a good solution to close a lot of ducts. As an example, if you use air conditioning in the same system, closing vents may reduce the airflow through the evaporator enough to make it freeze up and turn into a big block of ice.

4. Sometimes moving the thermostat to a different location will help.

5. Last resort, put a big fan upstairs and blow the hot air to the downstairs, but not near the thermostat.

6. I have a house in California that I purchased new from the developer and it has a 10 year defect warranty. See if there is any builder's, or subcontractor's warranty still valid.

7. Go talk to your local building department since they are supposed to have passed the system in final inspection.

8. Call the builder and talk to the most senior guy that you can get through to, explain your problem and ask him if he can either help, or suggest what to do. Be polite.

9. If the builder refuses to help, start writing letters to newspapers and magazines and make sure that you spell the builder's name correctly.

Keep the Thermostat at the setting where upstairs is comfy.

This makes downstairs too cold-don't worry!

Now Introduce a small blower (maybe a vaccuum cleaner modified)to blow over the downstairs radiators--into the downstairs volume.

You can switch off this new blower when you do not use downstairs too much.

End of Saga-- your fuel bill will remain low.

You will use heat downstairs only when you need to!

Sounds like a classic case of a poor air balance. For a ducted air-conditioning/heating system to work correctly there needs to be a balance set up for each room according to the load in that room.

It's a fairly complex thing and you will need some way of measuring the velocity of the air coming from each duct but you can try this.

First measure the velocity of air exiting each grill and using the area of the grill convert this to a volume of air.

Next calculate the volume of each room and convert this to a percentage of the total volume of the house.

Now adjust the outlets to each room so that they receive the appropriate percentage of the total air supplied.

You may need to tinker with the adjustments as reducing the flow at one outlet will increase it at all the others.

This may not fix the problem but it is a good place to start, regardless of the ultimate solution the system needs to be balanced before any other control calibration can take place.

I agree masu, but there are some unknowns. Thermostat location is huge. Where are the return registers located, are they open upstairs? Is it insulated at the floor of the attic, or at the attic roof? I would wait for a design winter day and get a temperature reading in the atttic, to ensure proper attic ventilation. A rebalance between the supply main for downstairs, and the main supply riser to the second floor would be an easy adjustment. The upstairs branch diffuser's cfm will all fall somewhat uniformly. Add a quater turn (+) on the downstairs supply main's volume damper, and a quarter turn (-) on the upstairs supply main riser's volume damper and see how she does. We should not be adjusting any individual branch ductwork.

Here is a cheaper (or simpler) way to do this. Call someone in the HVAC business and have them do a ductwork cleaning for you. they will clean your ductwork for mold and stuff so you'll have a clean ductwork, but best of all, if you ask them to, they usually will check your ductwork air balance, i.e., adjusting your vent so you'll have even flow both up stair and down stair. The person did my house told me they do this all the time as part of their service. Just thought you'll want to know.

MidniteFighter

Did you have this problem last winter too? If so, just get an hvac guy to set up the valves. (install the valves...grin!)

A two year old house should not have that problem. An inspector will tell you if you have the correct size duct work. There may be warranty considerations, so you should jump on this inspection asap. The builder will drag it out as long as possible to let the warranty period run out, so get an independant inspector. It may be a matter of the balancing valves not being set up...house built in the summer...contractor never got around to balancing the system. Nobody's fault...just has to get done sooner or later.

If it is a new problem this year....then look to see what went unbalanced. Did you get a duct cleaning company in? Maybe their tools closed a couple of balancing valves..they will do that. New construction often has pieces of drywall, plastic bags and all sorts of junk in the ductwork. This can't be good, but it is often easy to fix once you find it.

I had a house with this problem once...it turned out that a duct had come apart under the floor. We found which duct it was by going to each outlet in turn and seeing how long it took to fill up a standard garbage bag placed over the outlet. Worked for that application....grin! Then it was a matter of tracking the break. I believe I used a tape measure. When it hooked on the open part I knew exactly how far away from the outlet the break was.

I keep fixing this problem in people's houses by pulling baseboard shoes, window and door trim and foaming in the big gaps I always seem to find. Its not a matter of one part of the house being too hot, but rather the other part getting too cold too fast. I had one house settle in the first year so much that a full centimeter gap opened across the bottom of one wall! This was considered "normal" by smarter and more qualified people than me. Hmmmm. Well, it foamed in easily enough, stopped the draft. Fixed the problem. Imbalance gone.

Hope these ideas help.

Many houses have rooms diveded by walls. Air must move throught out the entire house in order to equalize the layers of heat laden air. In your case the heated air is rising to the second floor as it is lighter than cold air. Now you see why you have colder temperatures at lower elevations. A technition may be able to balance the duct system but I doubt it as most resdentional A/C systems are installed without much engineering.(cost)....Cheapest bid rules... Install a ceiling fan to move the stratified air.
Most fans are reversible in rotation so a little bit of experimentation will help. Relocation of the wall thermostat may be benificial. DW/ Del Sol Engineering...

If there is just one "return air" grill and it is located at the bottom of the stairwell, then you can try to install a ceiling fan at the top of the stairwell, to move some of the "warmer" upstairs air to the downstairs location. The thermostat should be located close to the return air grill as well.

10 degree + temp differential between upstairs and downstairs would not surprise me, though it would be more apparent during the cooling cycle.

If this problem occurs during the heating cycle, I can only assume that it occurs during the cooling cycle as well. On occasions, HVAC contractors do not want to go to the trouble of adding a second unit for an upstairs location. They simply base their calculations on total square footage of the dwelling, ignoring the fact that an upstairs exits.

You can try balancing the dampers, if any, at each supply air discharge grill. Just do not close them completely as this would add too much static pressure to the main trunk line and could cause one of the joints to separate.

You could try to extend the return air duct upstairs, but technically the HVAC system would be much more efficient if there was an upstairs evaporator / blower unit that has it's own condenser / compressor, totally separate from the downstairs unit. Additionally, it would have it's own thermostat, upstairs close to the return air grill.

Simply obtain 3 separate bids from 3 different HVAC contractors in your area, choose the best unit / price that meets your needs and have it installed.

If you are currently using gas for the heating cycle on your present system downstairs, you can have a heat pump installed for the upstairs unit as you will still get some heat rise from the downstairs unit.

Based on the limited information concerning your system, this is the best recommendation that I can provide at this point.

Good luck with your system!

Jeff

The furnace blower needs to run longer. The new high efficiency furnaces have a very small mass and once the heat source is off, the blower also goes off. A natural gravity separation of hot and cold ensues as cold air from windows and walls flows down stairs. Sometime you can get around this by running the blower all the time at a low setting and having it run high when the heat comes on.

The continuous blower would move air aroud the house and overcome the density separation you are having.

Another good plan is downdraft ceiling fans above the stairs on each floor

I had the same problem, very hot upstairs in winter. 2 story home with cathedral ceiling in family room ... Heat just shot straight up, even with ceiling fans it would still feel like 90 upstairs and 60 downstairs.. My problem was all the cold air returns were only upstairs, Large one in hallway and the rest in bed rooms and an office that sits next to the balcony overlooking the family room. This room gets to hot as it is... Since my hot air system is in the attic, with flexable insulated duct, I just re routed the office cold air return to one of the supply lines at the floor downstairs. Kinda like a by- pass. I had too many supply lines down there anyway. Now, the downstairs is much warmer, and the upstairs is more than comfortable...My wife noticed the change immediatly!

Tools needed..... cutting pliers and foil duct tape,,,,best 15 min ever spent!!!

also my master bedroom is over my garage, with its own zone heat. There is another staicase that goes down to a 12 x 20 room that we use as a gym....I have 1 supply heat vent in there but again no returns.. This week im going to try to get a return in there... I am thinking on just cutting through floor in one of my closets and putting in a cieling register, I believe that will al least help with air flow. Yes there is a door that closes off the gym . and as long as the register is at the oppise side from the supply, I should have the same effect!!!!

I just registered to this site, sorry if you get this in duplicate:

I had the same problem, very hot upstairs in winter. 2 story home with cathedral ceiling in family room ... Heat just shot straight up, even with ceiling fans it would still feel like 90 upstairs and 60 downstairs.. My problem was all the cold air returns were only upstairs, Large one in hallway and the rest in bed rooms and an office that sits next to the balcony overlooking the family room. This room gets to hot as it is... Since my hot air system is in the attic, with flexable insulated duct, I just re routed the office cold air return to one of the supply lines at the floor downstairs. Kinda like a by- pass. I had too many supply lines down there anyway. Now, the downstairs is much warmer, and the upstairs is more than comfortable...My wife noticed the change immediatly!

Tools needed..... cutting pliers and foil duct tape,,,,best 15 min ever spent!!!

also my master bedroom is over my garage, with its own zone heat. There is another staicase that goes down to a 12 x 20 room that we use as a gym....I have 1 supply heat vent in there but again no returns.. This week im going to try to get a return in there... I am thinking on just cutting through floor in one of my closets and putting in a cieling register, I believe that will al least help with air flow. Yes there is a door that closes off the gym . and as long as the register is at the oppise side from the supply, I should have the same effect!!!!