About a month ago, I was lamenting to my sister and her boyfriend about the differences in temperature between my first and second floor. With only one zone for the air conditioner in my house (I’m fortunate enough to have central air), my single thermostat regulates the whole house. As a result, I’m often shivering in a sweater sitting downstairs on the couch at night, but sweating in tank tops and shorts while working in my upstairs office during the day. What to do?
My sister’s boyfriend (whose father does air conditioning/heating work) suggested I close and seal one of the AC vents downstairs. I vaguely remember this suggestion from the inspector when I had the house checked last summer – close the upstairs vents in the winter and the downstairs ones in the summer. This forces the heat or air conditioning (depending on the season) to bypass the closed vents and more equally cool or heat the house. Since heat rises, this makes sense to me!
I finally got around to it this weekend, and it was a super simple process that required only a philips head screwdriver (check your vents to see what kind of screws it has), some saran wrap, and tape. First, I chose a vent to close off – I have a pretty open floor plan downstairs, so I chose one of the two on the same wall in the dining room:
Next, I closed off the vent. I could tell why my sister’s boyfriend suggested sealing it off, because I could still feel cool air pouring out.
Next, time to remove the vent. The screws were very long, but easy to remove:
Sometimes, if you paint around the vents instead of removing them (which would be the proper way to do it) or you put them back in before the paint has had enough time to dry, they can stick to the wall a bit. You can use a flathead screwdriver to *gently* remove them, but try not to damage the walls or you’ll find yourself doing a bit of repair work!
Once you’ve pulled out your vent, tear off a piece of plastic wrap that will fit over the back of it. I used Saran Wrap, because I think it’s stickier. Plus, that’s what I had in the house already.
At first, I thought it might be advisable to just put the vent back in and screw through the plastic, but the plastic gummed up the threads of the screws and made it almost impossible to line up the vent properly. So I learned the hard way that you should cut the saran wrap to fit, and tape off the edges to seal it:
Once that’s done, fit the vent back into the wall, screw the screws back in, and voila, you’re finished! And you can’t even tell that the vent is sealed with plastic wrap. I can feel the cooler air upstairs already…
* Just remember to take the plastic wrap off and open the vents when you switch over to heat in the cooler fall months.
[...] air to go upstairs and in the winter, seal the upstairs vents to force the warmer air down. The first time I did this, I used plastic wrap. It worked well, but was a bit of a hassle to remember to remove the plastic [...]