Heat duct tweaking

[Daox]

With the heating season now in full swing here, I'm wanting to do some tweaking with the heating ducts. My 2nd floor is always quite a bit warmer. Right now as I write this I have a thermometer upstairs and downstairs, its almost 5F warmer up there! This is no surprise as there are only 3 ducts downstairs, and 6 upstairs. On top of that, you have warm air rising which only helps keep the 2nd floor warmer.

Here is the floorplan with vents indicated by red dots. The larger dots are larger vents, the smaller dots are smaller vents.



As you can see, there are waaaay more vents upstairs. Add that to the fact that the kitchen vent is in the ceiling only makes things worse.


So, today I did a bit of tweaking. I figured a diverter that made more air exit the living room vent would be easy to make and keep some heat out of the 2nd floor.

Here is the living room vent.





I popped off the vent cover to see that there already was a deflector in the vent.





I decided to increase the size of the deflector hoping to divert even more air to the living room. To do this, I cut another piece of sheet metal I had and screwed it to the existing deflector.





I reinstalled it in the vent.





Then, I tweaked it to divert roughly 5/8 of air out of this vent. This seems like a lot even to me, but we'll see how it works. I can always adjust it.