Hot and Cold Spots in Your Home? Use These Tips to Manage Them

It’s a rare home in greater Phoenix that doesn’t suffer from hot and cold spots. The intense sun, combined with hot temperatures, makes managing temperatures throughout your home a challenge. It is possible, however, to even out the temperatures.

• Deal with the windows. South- and west-facing windows receive far more sunshine contributing to the solar heat gain in your home, unless you have thermal-rated windows. Low-e, dual, or triple-pane windows allow far less heat transfer and are the most effective way to stop excessive heat from the building. Shade screens also stop some of the heat entering through the windows.
• Check the ductwork. Leaking ducts lower the amount of air delivered to the rooms that they supply. Ask your HVAC contractor to test the ducts for leakage, SRP will pay you $75.00 for testing the ducts and offer a $400.00 rebate on sealing if there are leaks. Not only will the leaks reduce comfort, they increase energy bills in proportion to their size and reduce indoor air quality. We offer a patented sealing product called Aeroseal, no other duct sealing works as well as Aeroseal. US Department of Energy says Aeroseal duct sealing is the best energy-saving upgrade that you can apply to your home.
• Inspect the registers. All the registers should be open and clean. It’s tempting to close off a room that you seldom use to save energy, but in reality, shutting a register can damage your HVAC system by increasing the pressure throughout the system. It may end up costing you more to repair the ducts and mechanical components than the energy you save. You should never close off more than 10% of the registers.
• Consider a zoning system. A zoned HVAC system lets you control the temperatures individually for different areas in your home for the best management of hot and cold spots. HVAC professionals divide the home into similar parts and install zone dampers and separate thermostats. Almost all homes benefit from a zoning system, especially:
  Two-story homes
  Homes with seldom-used areas
  Those with large expanses of south- or west-facing windows, or raised ceiling plates in some areas.
  A zoning system can be installed as part of a new system, or as a retrofit for your existing system. When combined with programmable thermostats, they provide a high degree of energy efficiency and comfort.
• Insulation. Is your home insulated correctly? At Wolff Mechanical we have even come across brand new homes where some areas are not insulated. This can easily happen during construction as the insulated areas get covered by drywall quickly in the building process. Wolff Mechanical can easily check areas for insulation we have a heat sensor that can tell just by pointing it at a wall if the wall is insulated.

For more information about managing the hot and cold spots in your home, contact Wolff Mechanical, providing top-notch HVAC services for Phoenix homeowners.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in the Phoenix Valley area of Arizona about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).