In line duct fans for boosting heat to a room
 

I'm quickly finding out that the poor duct routing in my house is keeping my kitchen on the cool side as the temperature outside drops. I was talking with Higgy the other day and he mentioned he was looking into these in line duct fans to boost airflow to his living room since he has the same problem. Has anyone used these items and do you have any advise?

In Line Duct Fan,boost air flow

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Assuming that your furnace is sized appropriately and your fan is capable of pushing air through the longest (equivalent length not necessarily actual length) leg of your HVAC system (I'm willing to be it's your kitchen because it's the coldest) you can adjust the dampers inside of the registers of the other rooms in the house to balance the legs. Basically for free you could go to the hottest room in the house and close the register nearly all the way second hottest room and adjust it 7/8 open etc...

This would essentially make it so that all of the legs have the same pressure and would flow the same volume of air through them.

I've actually already tried that Cory, and it didn't work...at least for me it didn't. I've also been told that closing those vents too much is actually bad for the furnace as well (the guy that came to clean my vents told me that). That's why I've been looking into this myself.

Fair enough; I've had a lot of theories that didn't pan out.

cory

I've also adjusted things on mine. The ducting is just not setup good at all in the house. The entire kitchen is supposed to be heated by about a 3"x10" register... not gonna happen lol. To boot, its in the ceiling instead of near the floor. Also, the two northern bedrooms upstairs get next to no warm air flow, but the two on the south side get tons. I added deflectors in the main verticle duct and that has helped some. I'll probably tweak those, but the kitchen still needs help.

Well, I feel stupid. :o Last night I decided to take a little closer look at the situation. As it turns out, the kitchen vent was closed most of the way! I could have sworn it was open. I know I've felt heat comming out of it before. Anyway, in my defense, it has a brass decorative cover over it, and the flapper part is black and behind the brass cover so its really hard to see. Its open now and I should have a good deal more heat in the kitchen. We'll see how that works!

we have closed the vents in our master bedroom / master bath / and guest bath to try to get more heat into the girls bedrooms ( across the house).
there rooms are always cold...

When we close our bedroom vent to much - it starts to rattle - not fun to sleep under that.
Was goiing to throw more insulation above there rooms and see if we can keep the heat in there - but fans like this might be the way to go...

The big advantage to the duct fan over closing the dampeners in the ducts is that it is controllable from the ground. I have my bedroom on a high flow duct; very cold when the a/c is on allot, and hot when the a/c runs very rarely.

daox, would re-running the duct to the kitchen be a viable option?

Ok...I found a couple of these at the one of the smaller local hardware stores. Just have to buy the wiring now and either figure out how to install it myself, or get my father in law or brother in law to help out and see if it helps our living room.

...I also found a bunch of other cool things for insulating the hot water tank and hot water pipes...too bad I already used something else. It was that reflective stuff that it suppose to keep the heat in. You can actually use it in the ceiling too. Oh well.

I'll let you know how the heat situation is once I install these.