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Why your second floor is too hot — and the definitive guide on how to fix it right & cheap
You may have purchased a new home or built it recently, and during summer, you notice it is extremely hot in the second floor. This may not be a problem for those who do not have allergies because they can open the windows to let in the fresh air, which is actually also cleaner than the air circulating inside the house. You also cannot run the fan because it makes allergies worse, when you do that (it is a good way to keep the air cooler for cheap).
Now, that we are all working from home for the past few months, I was having a real problem with my office room which has several computers, an AV receiver and medium size book shelf speakers. Moving some of the equipment out, did help, but the major problems were:
- It was icy cold downstairs, while it was oppressively hot upstairs.
- When we used to go out to office, it was hard to sleep at night because no matter how long we ran the AC, the bedroom would still be musty and hot.
So, I went on the quest to find out why and how to fix this problem without putting in an ugly window AC which makes noise and also blocks half of the only window I had in my office room…
I got an HVAC guy to take a look, and I was lucky to find someone who knew what he was doing.
The problem was that in a bid to get things done cheap, the builder had put in no return channels in the second floor.
What we also found strange was that they may have tried to spoof the inspectors by putting in return grilles for supplies, giving the impression that these were returns while they were actually supplies…
What does all this mean?
The supply is where the air comes into the room from.
The return is where the air is sucked back into the HVAC system.
For optimal cooling, the air needs to circulate inside the house, and the warm air would get cooled, and go everywhere. One of my initial ideas of putting in an exhaust…
