Heating the second floor better
 

Hey guys. I'm trying to figure out a way to heat my kids room better on the second floor. Their rooms sit over the garage so that's one of the bad things about their rooms. I opened up the garage ceiling once to check and it looks like they put two layers of fiberglass bat. I'd like to open it all up one day and spray foam that whole area. But that won't be for a while.

The heat coming out of their vents is minimal. I think I've located which vent it is and there's not much I can do in the way of taping it up as it almost goes directly from the main square vent up into the ceiling in the basement, but I will tape what I can. The only thing I could think of was trying to pull out the vent that I can see, and try and put an inline duct fan into that vent to try and force some extra air up there.

I closed a few of the vents slightly in rooms where I didn't think we needed the heat as much, but I don't like to tamper with that too much as I don't want to kill my furnace.

Any suggestions?

I don't think you'll kill your furnace if you close off other vents to get more hot air over that way. I've done this to quite an extent in my house (cause my vent system is really pretty screwed up), and my 15 year old furnace is happily chugging away. That is why we have the adjustable heat registers, so you can tweak and balance air flow to each room.

If that doesn't work, I'd probably look into one of those inline fans to help push more heat into the room.

Other than that, are there any noticeable air leaks or anything else you can do to stop the room from cooling down as fast?

No air leaks from what I know. When I had an audit done on the house they said it was sealed up pretty good. The only really big holes we in the kitchen and around the gas fireplace. The air that's blowing through their vents is just really weak compared to any other room upstairs. Not so much worried about it when they're sleeping as I am when they're playing in their rooms.

If you don't have your furnace manual, you can look it up online. Put a thermometer probe into the vent nearest your furnace(it needs to be open for this test), close the desired vents so you have air going where you want it and watch the temperature difference between the coldest area that your furnace is pulling return air from and the temperature coming out of this supply register. You don't want to be on the ragged edge of what your furnace manual specifies for temperature rise and definitely not over it. If you can stay in the temperature rise range, you should be okay.

Be sure you change your filters often when doing this because you've got a more sensitive system to your filters getting clogged when you are closing vents like this.

Ok I'll give that a try. Thanks.