3 Causes of Uneven Heating

Your heater is working… you can hear the hum of it operating, you can even feel its warmth: but for some reason the heat isn’t spreading evenly throughout your home. Some rooms upstairs are warmer than others, and maybe some rooms even have an arctic feel to them. Is your heating system on the fritz? Or could it be something else?

At Quality Air Heating and Air Conditioning, we don’t want you to live with the discomfort of hot and cold spots. We’ve put together a list of three causes that might be behind the uneven heat in your home. If you need expert help for your Columbus, OH heating needs, contact us today and take advantage of our 24-hour emergency service.

• Closed or blocked vents: This is the simplest problem to fix. If you have vents closed in certain rooms, or if furniture has been moved so that some of the vents are blocked, then you will find parts of your home lack heating. Do a check on all vents to see that they are free to release heated air.
• Poor home insulation: Heat will try to find any place to escape to the outdoors: space around the doors, gaps at the edges of windows, or through an open damper in the chimney. Heat that finds its way out will cause your home to feel warm in some places and not in others. The best prevention for this is to have effective insulation in your walls. It is especially important to have good insulation in your attic, since heat rises and the attic is a prime spot where it can get out.
• An incorrectly sized heater: A home heating system needs to be sized appropriately. A heater that is too small will struggle to heat your whole home, and you may find cold spots because of it. An overly-large heater can cause a similar problem, since it will raise the temperature so rapidly that it will shut off before the heat can spread out evenly. You will need an HVAC technician to perform a heat load calculation—a process that takes into account numerous factors in your home—to discover the ideal heater size to serve your needs.

Uneven heating can have a simple solution, or it could require a new heater installation. If basic steps don’t work to alleviate the issue, then it’s time to bring in professionals to see what is causing the problem. In Columbus, heating experts on staff at Quality Air Heating and Air Conditioning can get to the root of the trouble and offer you the best way to remedy it. Contact us today to schedule an appointment.