Installing Jumper Ducts to Make Bedrooms More Comfortable

hey I'm Larry janeski from dr. Energy Saver you know we have dr. Energy Savers all over the United States and in our country we have so many different climates we have coastal climates we have mountain climates we have dry hot climates like in the southwest we have cold climates we have mixed humid climates and we have hot humid climates as represented by where we are today in Central Florida you know the purpose of a home is to create comfort for the homeowners for the occupants and what do we like as far as comfort well we like it between 70 and 75 degrees we like low relative humidity and in any of the climates we always have challenges we want to keep heat out of the building in some climates or some seasons and other seasons we're going to keep heat in the building and we want to control humidity well Florida homes here in the southeast have lots of problems let's take a look one of the big problems with heating and air conditioning systems in any climate is that they're not pressure balanced throughout the house with a even distribution of supply air to each room and return air to each room in this case this is very common around here we have our air handler so this is our air conditioning and we have our return coming in the bottom and our supply duct going out the top now the supply trunk line runs through the attic and supplies are branched off to each room let's take a look what the return air duct is doing here we are just outside the utility room and we see a return grill here and a return grill here well there's no other returns anywhere else in the house this means that we are drawing all our returned air from these common areas from the kitchen from the living room from the dining room and from the central hallway when bedroom doors are closed we have no return air coming back from the bedrooms let's see what happens here we are in one of the three bedrooms of this house and here we see a supply duct so from the duct system the conditioned air comes out of this duct but there's no return duct in this bedroom so what will happen is the supply air will blow up the bedroom so we'll have positive pressure in this bedroom and force more air out through the sliding glass door through any windows through the walls through the ceiling into the Attic and that is not a good thing we're pushing conditioned air outside the house let's measure and quantify the this difference in pressure when this bedroom door is open the door opening itself serves as the returned because the central area is where we're drawing air back to the HVAC system so this really is our return the air can go out of the supply duct into the bedroom and run out through the hallway but the problem is when we close the door let me close the door we no longer have a return into that bedroom and this could be a problem let's measure it I have a device here that can quantify the pressure difference across the door and if I close this door that I have five point four Pascal's of negative pressure two-and-a-half Pascal's is acceptable we have the air handler running supply duct this pumping air into this bedroom but no return air is coming out because the door is closed five point three Pascal's and negative pressure that means that side has more pressure this side has less pressure that means that side is going to push air out of the house and on this side the main area the living area the kitchen and so forth we're depressurizing it because we're taking more air from it then we're putting back into it we're putting a disproportionate amount of air into the bedrooms that cannot then get back so what we're doing in the main kitchen and living area is sucking air in through the walls through the windows and doors from the attic and from any air holes that to the outside to make up for it so having imbalanced air pressure in a house because the duct system is not designed properly is going to increase the amount of air leakage in the house the exchange of air between inside and outside it's going to make our home feel more drafty it's going to make in this climate it's going to draw a hot humid humid air from the outside into the house that we then have to pay electricity to run our air conditioning system to remove that moisture to cool that air it's just not good situation so what we're going to do is fix this problem now many homes north-south-east-west will have a central return from the HVAC system in a central hallway and we still have the same problem here there's supply ducts in various rooms and no return ducts in those rooms when we close those doors our pressures are way off so what we're going to do to fix this problem is add a return grill in each of these three bedrooms so that supplier can get in and return air can get out and we balance the pressures not only in those bedrooms when the doors are closed but also in the main body living area of the house so we have less air exchange from inside to outside one way or the other okay so now we've added our return grills as you can see in here we put that returned in this room and we put returns in these other two bedrooms three extra returns and now let's see before we had 5 Pascal's of negative pressure in here or 5 Pascal's a positive pressure we should say in the bedroom with the air handler running now we've added the returns let's see what happens now and look at that under 2 Pascal's of pressure - Pascal's before we are about 5 so what's happening is the new returned that we put in you can see it here that's the return that we put in is now allowing air to get out of this room back to the air handler so that we don't blow up the room with pressure when we blow up the room with pressure because we don't have a return and only a supply what happens is this less air comes out of the supply because it got positive pressure against it backing it up against the supply duct so less air will come out now we have less positive pressure more air will come out of the supply duct and the air could get back out of our return duct so now if we look at this room and this room was about 5 Pascal's before we have one and a half less than two Pascal's of positive pressure in this room so the returned ducts that we put in there were jumper ducts is what they were they did the trick we hope this video has really helped you get an understanding of what we do here we hope your home is the next one we have the opportunity to work on give us a call today

Channel: Dr. Energy Saver

Views: 1,370,738

Keywords: Energy, energy efficient, save energy, save money, home insulation, HVAC, heating, cooling, lower energy bills, lower electric bills, lower heating bills, home energy audits, energy audits

Id: I0LxBLJGO24

Length: 7min 31sec (451 seconds)

Published: Mon May 07 2012