If you’re like most Americans, you rely on your heating system to keep your family and home safe during the cold winter season. Most heating systems are controlled by one thermostat and will adequately heat all rooms of a home to a specific desired temperature. If you’ve noticed that your home has cold spots, it’s time to evaluate what’s causing that uneven heating and get it fixed before it gets worse.
Closed/Obstructed Vents
For your forced air heating system to work, there needs to be both a supply and return vent in each room of your home. It’s not uncommon to close a vent during the summer or accidentally put something right in front of it. If the vents are closed or obstructed for a particular room, it’s not going to be able to get the proper amount of heat from your furnace to warm up.
Fortunately, this is a very easy fix. Go to the rooms that you have cold spots in and evaluate both of your vents. If one or more is obstructed, then simply move things out of the way, and your home should go back to heating up evenly.
Unnecessary Air Drafts
Probably the most obvious reason that certain rooms of your home or not heating up as well as others is that those rooms have air drafts. These drafts develop most commonly by your doors and windows. Run your hand along the seam of both your windows and doors and see if you can feel cold air coming in. If so, you’ll want to cover up that draft with a material like weather stripping. When you’re able to eliminate the air drafts in the room, it should be able to heat up normally like the rest of your home.
System Short Cycling
If you started to notice that it sounds like your furnace is constantly kicking on and off, you could have a problem with short cycling. This happens when your heating system continually kicks on and off without running through a complete heating cycle. It’s not able to generate enough heat in order to adequately heat all the rooms of your home. This problem is best addressed by one of our HVAC professionals who has the experience and knowledge to identify the root problem of your short cycling and fix it.
Unmaintained Furnace
As a homeowner, it’s your responsibility to get your furnace serviced every single year by a professional. Part of the service is many different tasks like cleaning out your furnace, lubricating moving parts, and so forth. If you skip over this annual maintenance regularly, you’re likely to develop problems with the various components inside of your furnace. This can lead to many issues with uneven heating. To remedy this problem, you want to call in one of our service technicians to properly service your heating system and get it back up and running as efficiently as possible.
Ducting Leaks
As heat is forced through the heat exchanger, it then makes its way to your ducting. This ducting runs throughout your entire home in your wall cavities and underneath your floors. It works to deliver warm air throughout all the rooms of your home. Whenever there are leaks or gaps in your ducting, warm air can be forced out into the wall cavities.
If you’re noticing that most of the rooms that are farthest away from your furnace are not being heated adequately, it’s likely due to a leak in your ductwork. The best way to remedy this problem is to have a professional evaluate the state of your ductwork and seal it up if necessary. This will remove the gaps and leaks from your ductwork and allow the warm air to reach all of the rooms in your home adequately.
Dirty Air Filter
Your heating system has an air filter that is responsible for keeping dust and debris out of your furnace. It also keeps the indoor air of adequate quality for your family. As more and more debris gets stuck in the filter, it reduces the airflow capacity of your heating system. If you don’t change out your filter on a regular basis, the dirty filter will restrict the amount of heat that can make it through to all the rooms of your home.
Fortunately, fixing this issue is as easy as taking out the dirty air filter and putting a new one in it. As a general rule of thumb, you should be checking your air filter at least once a month to see if it needs to be replaced.
Undersized Heating System
If you’ve recently moved into a new home, uneven heating may be due to an existing undersized heating system. The best way to determine if your system is undersized is to take a look at its heating capacity and compare that to what your home’s necessary heating capacity is. You can likely get the BTU heating capacity right off the side of your furnace, or you should be able to look it up online.
When it comes to determining the necessary heating capacity for your home, you’ll want to take the total square footage of your home and multiply it by 50. This will give you the necessary BTU heating capacity that your Las Vegas home needs to supply adequate heat to all the rooms in it. If your furnace’s heating capacity is less than what you have determined your necessary heating capacity needs are, it’s undersized. The only way to fix this problem is to upgrade to a bigger heating system that has the necessary heating capacity to meet what you figured up your home’s needs to be.
Poorly Designed Home
Unfortunately, homes aren’t always designed with having impeccable HVAC ventilation in mind. Rather, many times homes are designed with unique features that can make it more difficult for your heating system to evenly heat all the rooms in your home. Some examples of these features include vaulted ceilings, a wall of windows, and even a multi-level home. To remedy this issue, you’ll need to consult with one of our HVAC technicians to determine what your options are. Each home feature is going to have a different solution compared to the next.
Aging System
If you’ve checked all the other sources of potential uneven heating to no avail, it could be that your furnace is reaching the end of its lifespan. Most furnaces are constructed to last anywhere between 15 and 20 years. When your furnace reaches the end of its life span, it works less efficiently. This can cause less heat output delivered to all the rooms of your home. Unfortunately, the only way to solve this problem is to upgrade your existing heating system to a new one that can work efficiently.
Quality Heating Services
Polar Air & Heating, Inc. always offers quality heating services for our Las Vegas, NV, customers. We also help with cooling, ductless mini-split, commercial, and indoor air quality services. Call us today to schedule your next service appointment.
