Hi, I am Yancey Lowe, General Manager of Utility Service Express. I am here to talk to you about few ways and things you can do to improve your heating and cooling needs.
Today, I am going to talk about the dampers in your ductwork and the proper use of them. Before I get into that though, I would like to talk to you about heat and as we all know with heat in the wintertime, if you have a two or three storey house, your top rooms will always be hot and your bottom room will always be cold. That's been a very common problem in most people's houses. As we know in summer, it's just the opposite. You go to turn the air on the third floor is always hotter than the first floor.
This is where dampers come and what dampers do is control the flow of air and what I want to teach you today is the proper use of them. So what we need to do in the wintertime. We know that we got enough heat on the third floor, that we got that cold basement and the way we are going to counteract that is we're going to find the ductwork, it goes to the third floor which is this guy and in the wintertime I am going to shut him off.
Now in most houses they will be marked either O for open or C for close. In this place, we got it closed right here as you noticed, it's not marked. Now if this is your case, it's really easy to tell. When this thing is close, you are going to notice this handle is tight and when it is opened up, you have a little jiggling and it's a little loose. So once you have found out in your particular case which one is open and which one is close, it's good to go ahead and take a marker and go ahead and mark C or Closed and then bring it back to open and choose the open. That way coming in the next season, you won't have to guess again. You will know exactly which way your damper should be.
Now by doing that, what we've done is we're pushing the heat into the first and second floor and as we know the heat will naturally rise and this is going to warm that cold basement up a little bit more and then in the summer time, we're going to come and do the opposite. We're going to turn this guy back on and turn our lower ductwork, we're going to put those dampers off and by doing this we're pushing the cold air coming out of the air conditioner to the third floor which we know is the hottest rooms and we know cold air is going to naturally filter its way down in the house.
By doing this, we will get a more even temperature even on the hottest day and on the coldest day and another good aspect of it, this guy right here is not going to have to run much. You're going to be more efficient that way. Air conditioner is going to run a little bit less in the summer and the burner is going to run a little bit less in the winter.
Next thing I like to talk to you about is finding and sealing leaks in your ductwork, very common thing in your house and it's a very easy thing to fix. We're going to talk about that next.
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