I started to write this in the thread about ceiling fans, but I decided it deserved its own thread.
My house is in the San Fernando Valley, built in 1939. It originally had a swamp cooler, I will guess that when it was built it had wall heaters.
Sometime since then, the systems were changed; it’s now central heat and air, and BOTH use the old swamp cooler ducts in the ceiling.
I also have ceiling fans in almost every room.
Here’s what I wonder: how inefficient is this? Since heat rises, it seems very wasteful to force cool air through that heat layer down into the room, and I’m assuming that my AC runs twice as hard as it would otherwise to get the job done, and probably takes longer to reach the thermostat temperature.
On the heating side, again, since heat rises, what heat my house already has naturally has drifted upward when it’s cold, right? And my system is trying to blow downward to warm the house.
Then there’s the fans… being positioned in the ceiling, next to the warmest air, it seems like they would be best set to “suck” in summer, pulling the warm air up, and “blow” in winter, pushing warm air down…but since my heating and cooling are coming OUT of the ceiling, it seems like maybe the fans should always be set to “blow” whatever temperature-altered air I’m trying to get into the house downward.
So, ultimately, isn’t it WAY WAY more efficient to send the heated OR cooled air UP from vents close to the floor? Wouldn’t it save scads of energy? Might it even be worth investing in making the change over the long run? (I work at home and control the temperature in my house almost 24/7 - my summer cooling bills on a 1700 square foot house can run to $500 a month and if it gets really frigid a month’s heating can run a couple hundred, even here in El Lay. We do have weather, it’s just California mellow. And frankly, I don’t see how folks can function otherwise. Maybe it’s fun to wake up to snow once in awhile, but trying to drive and travel and function in it for weeks and months? Yipes.)