We love to be able to save our customers money! When we perform home energy audits across the city of Jacksonville, we help homeowners uncover opportunities to reduce energy usage and related bills. What about air vents, though? There is often a lot of confusion as to whether or not you should be closing up air vents in certain unused rooms. Is this practice that you should act upon routinely?
Air Vents in Every Room
If you have an air conditioning or forced hot air heating system, chances are you have air ducts everywhere! Each room of the household will have a duct to allow the cold or warm air to blow in. What if there are rooms that you never enter? You probably have thought about closing up those vents to reduce airflow. The idea here is that you would save money, right? You may not be as spot-on accurate as you think!
The Case to Keep Air Vents Open
You want always to be sure that your air vents are open. Closing off vents in individual rooms is not a trick to saving money! Damage may arise from closing air vents.
Keeping air vents open is going to help with the entire ventilation of the home. When you close air vents, you are not going to be able to stop all airflow completely. What closing the vents will do, though, is put added pressure on the entire ventilation system!
Increase in Pressure
What will happen when you close up air vents is that you will put more pressure on the system! If you have a heater or an air conditioning system that uses a variable-speed blower, increased air pressure means more power is used. The blower will have to put more force into what it is doing and utilize more energy than if all vents were open.
If you are an HVAC owner with a single-speed blower, you are also out of luck. A single-speed blower will reduce airflow, stopping it from moving around. Rooms with open vents will not have adequate airflow to keep them comfortable.
More Damaging Side Effects
Closing air vents can result in even more damaging side effects. Frozen evaporator coils and leaks in the air ducts are just a few! The biggest of all is that you could do permanent damage to your compressor, resulting in a costly repair bill or even a need for replacement.
Our home energy audit professionals in Jacksonville, FL want to save you money. We also want to try and erase many of the myths that exist about HVAC systems. One myth, closing air vents to save money, hopefully, has been laid to rest. Keep those air vents open because closing them could result in increased energy usage and
actual damage to your HVAC system!
