Oh, No! I Don't Wanna Go Down There! Part One, Warm Air

In an earlier post from 1-17-09, we promised to revisit the machinery of heating/cooling and equip you with a dangerously small amount of knowledge concerning your own comfort systems. While you're arming yourself with the necessaries: flashlight, pad and pen, digital camera, possibly rubber boots, let's look around upstairs. This post is Part One, before we go into the basement. Positive attitude music for this post is by Martha and the Vandellas.

Do you even have a basement? No? Don't panic. Do you have thermostats in every room? Breakers marked "Heat" in your electrical panel (see that previous post)? You can kibitz with us as we do this safari, but your search is over. You have baseboard electric heat, and the only things you can do as a concerned amateur are: keep thermostats set as low as you can bear, and vacuum the radiators, preferably with heat off, to remove dust which slows down heat transfer.
Have the electric heat people left the tour? Coming anyway? Fine. Does everyone else have radiators of some sort, either cast iron monsters or baseboard models of cast iron or sheet metal? Is that a hand at the back? You have no radiators, just grilles in your ceiling or floor? No problem. Let's start with you. Radiator people, exclusive of electric heat users, you can bunk off for a smoke or wait for the next post, Part Two. Let's help these people with grilles first.

Those grilles are connected to ducts, which form a distribution system originating somewhere in your house/apartment/condo. Do you have a large noisy sheet metal box outside that runs both summer and winter? That's a heat pump. It ices up sometimes in colder weather, doesn't it? Yes. Not much you can do about that, unless it remains iced up for hours or days. Then you have to call the service person to come and address the "defrost cycle" controls. Actually, you heat pump people in New England can almost turn off your outdoor units (called "condensers" whether they're heating or cooling at the time) since their heating performance at temperatures below 35 degrees is spotty at best. When it's close to freezing, it's very hard to draw heat from the outside air, which is what condensers do in winter. Now come along with the rest of us and let's find your "blower coil" or "air handler," from which the air is propelled out through the ducts.

All those without basements are looking for a closet or ceiling hatchway where the air handler sits. Turn the system on and follow the noise. Look for a large grille in a wall, ceiling or floor that doesn't blow warm air. That's the return, and the air handler is usually close by. The reason you're searching is that the air handler has a filter, either in a slot in the return duct or possibly behind a large return grille in the house. You need to change that filter regularly. That blank look tells me you REALLY need to change your filter, and soon. If you're looking into a closet, look for a narrow slot with a cover and two screws near the bottom of the air handler. If you're in your attic, look among the various screw-secured covers and find the narrowest one, sometimes marked with a sticker indicating filter size, such as "16x25" and so on. If your system is old, you may find the cover missing and just the edge of the filter peeking through the slot. Pull the filter out gently; wear a mask if you sneeze easily, have a vacuum handy if you can't stand the dust, and read along the sides and edges for a size. That filter will likely be available at the home center in several types at varying cost. Avoid the cheapest (spun fiberglass) and the most expensive (activated charcoal with bacteriostatic chemical additives) and get something pleated and non-chemical coated, unless you're all about bells and whistles. The job you want the filter to do is to trap dust and dander (your pets have dander, but your hirsute teenage son does NOT, and don't forget it. Family Services will get you for statements like that), and any other airborne crud you want removed from your house is best confronted at its source. Again, we're not discussing your son's room in any way.

If you've changed your filter, replaced the filter cover, or perhaps sealed up the filter slot with tape if your cover's gone, you've done all you can. i carry two powerful vacuums on my truck, one exclusively for soot, and i frequently remove the covers from air handlers and vacuum out dust and lint from the coils and blower. That helps to cut mold growth and lets more air pass through the coils (heating and cooling cycles use different coils but share a common blower). Can you do this at home? Who am I to tell someone they don't know how to run a vacuum? The hazard is contained in the live wires and delicate parts behind the covers of that blower cabinet.
I don't advise you to risk breakage or a shock going in there. The fee for a seasonal service should include vacuuming or even washing your coils. Be very specific in requesting this of your service people. If they tell you it's extra, ask how much. Clean coils and blower vanes are worth fussing a bit to maintain.

One group we need to talk to here are the folks with grilles, but no heat pumps. If you have air handlers blowing warm air through ducts, but your big condenser beast outside doesn't run in winter, deal with your filters just like the heat pump people, and rejoin us in Part Two when we go into the basement and find your heat source.

And our last remarks are for people with grilles, but no air handlers, who will be going down those fateful stairs to search for..... Fortunato, that fella Poe bricked up in the cellar with a cask of wine? No, nothing like that. You'll be joining us down there to confront that brooding monster, your warm air furnace. All the people whose systems are "above stairs," so to speak, are back in front of the TV, but they'll miss the adventure when we descend into places of intrigue and cat poo in Part Two.