This past summer I moved into a condo with forced air heating (and a/c). My old home had a boiler so I have no experience with forced air.
The registers for my system are on the wall. They are in pairs, with one near the ceiling and one near the floor. They both can be closed using louvers. It was my understanding that this arrangement made it possible to have the air conditioning come out of the top register while the heat would come out the bottom. This worked fine in the summer. Now that heating season is upon us, I went around and closed the top registers ond opened the bottom ones. This does not seem to work so well. The heat still wants to come out the top and does not seem to be redirected to the bottom (although some heat does come out the bottom).
As I write this it occurs to me that I have misunderstood the system and that the only reason for closing a register is to try to balance a system between rooms (if a room at the end of the circuit is cool you can close the registers in another room so that more heat goes to the cool room). It seems to me that I would be better off having the heat come from the bottom registers, but the system may not be set up to do that.
So, have I answered my own question, or is there some other way to redirect the heat to the bottom registers?
The bottom ones may be cold air returns, but I don’t know why they would let you close them. Is this arrangement in every room? If it is, I don’t know why they would need so many cold air returns.
I don’t think they are cold air returns. There is one large vent in the hallway ceiling that I believe is the return.
I’m not a furnace guy or anything, but since heat rises, I always thought cold air returns were usually near the floor.
WAG- the contractor ran out of non-closable vents so he just stuck closable ones in the cold air returns. I’ve never heard of having dual vents, and unless you have a high ceiling it doesn’t matter where they’re located. I have both heat/AC and cold air returns along the floor (and generally one cold air return for each room) and it works fine.
Most homes and apartments are built with supplies in each room and one or two returns in a common are. Some nicer systems have returns in each space. There is a way to test. Open all registers. Turn on the furnace. See wich registers have air comming out of them. Now take a small piece of tissue on put accross the other registers. If they are being pulled in or held inplace they are return air registers. If no noticable air in or out the may be a cross over vent.