463. Closing Unused Vents In Home

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I'm Derek Cole, host of the Derek Cole Podcast and we believe in taking the time to explain how things work for your air at home or your business. Let's get into today's episode. Please listen closely and maybe even take some notes so you can remember these insights of home comfort and energy savings and share this episode with three of your friends because we all need to.

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Thanks again for listening and let's begin. A question we get a lot is closing vents in rooms. I'm not using this room. Close the vent off. Is that something I should be doing? Can I close the vent off on this room? Look, your house is made and designed to condition to those amounts of grills and runs in that room or in that space. You can close the door if you have enough room, you know, under the.

Door for there to get back to the return.

So, you know, you go to go to some houses, they have really thick carpet and if you close the door, it's, you know, it's getting really hard to close the door. You kind of got slam at four, force it shut. That is too tight that the air is going to have a hard time coming out of that room because what goes in must come out. If it goes into the house, into.

The room, it must come back to return.

So you want it to make, you want to make it as easy as possible for the air to come out because air is just like water. It takes the easiest path. So you want it to get to the return unrestricted because you want that clean conditioned air versus the air from the outside or in the crawl space or through the walls. You can't control that, that's unconditioned air. But you can control the air that comes back to return to make it the conditioned, clean tempered air getting back to the vents. But I would, when you go back to vents, I would never close them. The reason you have vents on the outside of the house, on the outside walls. If you go to your room, you see it on the, at the window or at the outside wall. Well, it's trying to take care of that, trying to take care of that wall, trying to take care of that perimeter. So that's why you don't see a grill or you see it very rarely on the inside wall or on, in the middle of the house because you're trying to take care of that heat from the outside heating. There is all about heat transfer. Right. So there, there's no cold air. It's only, only degrees of heat. So the most infiltration you get is from the outside walls. So you're trying to condition those. And depending on summer or winter, it doesn't matter, you're trying to condition those walls for the temperature you want in your house. It wants to take care of the outside walls or the windows that's affected by the weather. The weather is making that window or that wall, depending on warm, cool. You want to affect it with the air coming out of your system. So closing off the grill affects that and the airflow getting into that room. So say you have a split unit and your fan is blowing the air out, where's it going to go? It's going to try to come back. If the grill's closed, it's going to try to come back. Maybe. So if that fan has to work, if it comes back, that fan has to work harder to push the air out. It's getting resistance because the vents are closed off. That's going to cause the problem. So if the fan has to work harder to get the air where it needs to go, is it saving you money or costing you money? Costing.

Right.

It costs you more money because working harder with the equipment and you want to work as easy as it can. That way you have it, keep it maintained, keep it clean, keep the energy bills as low as possible. The unit does not have to work that hard, so, so it can run the way it's supposed to and not have the added pressure of, of more air coming back to unit. So I would never close off the vents. And, and while I'm on this tangent, I'm also going to talk about plastic diverters. Same principle. You go to some houses and you see the plastic diverters, you know, on the floor, the ceiling versus the wall, they're trying to blow the air into the middle of the room. Well, if you're going to do a smoke test, a smoke test in your house, then you would see when the air comes on, if it's on the floor when there comes on and it comes out the grill, you'll see it go up to the ceiling and then fall back down. The wall is trying to condition that outside wall. So by pushing the air into the middle of the house or the middle of the room, it's not doing any good because you're still having that challenge of it not being able to take care of the outside wall.

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