We’ve recently moved the TV room downstairs (which is an experience I’ve yet to bitch write about…) and since then the house has seemed a little colder.
What I think is happening is that before we had the vents in the basement closed and now they’re open. Which means when the thermostat kicks in in the morning we’re heating the basement for no reason. Especially when that heat could be sent upstairs to keep me warm.
I found a automatic vent at Home Depot called the “Vent-Miser” from Springfield Precision (and I couldn’t find a working webpage for them beyond this press release.) Currently I have it set to close at 12:30am at night (just in case I’m up at night, the heat actually turns off at 11:00pm) and not open till about 5:30pm on the weekdays and 10:00am on weekends.
The downstairs vent is currently the only vent in the house which could see a benefit from the Vent-Miser. We generally leave our doors upstairs open so shutting off some vents won’t really help in the winter. in the summertime it might be an idea to have the cold air blown directly to the top of the house and have it trickle down but it’s a few months before we have to worry about that.
Along the same lines as the vents, I had to tape over the bathroom exhaust vent. It’s a cold and windy night. Windy from just the right direction to blow back through the vent and into the bathroom. Brrr.
I could have just closed the bathroom door I guess, and I did try that for a little bit today, but it got so cold it would have been a bit of a shock to take a shower in the morning. Heck, maybe it’d even freeze the pipes!
I just hope Anita remembers to pull it off when she gets up in the morning.
