Hello,
My question is: how can I provide fresh air and comfortable temperature to a room that I built into our garage?
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Specifically, we have two HVAC type problems in the garage room:
1. In the warm months, the air in the garage room gets too warm and stuffy. The room is so air-tight that it can’t breathe like the rest of the house. Also, we keep the indoor air in the main house at 79F, year-round, for health reasons. So, the system is not in cooling mode very often. Finally, the room is used for TV and computer activities, so there is a fair amount of heat generated in the room.
2. In the cold months, the garage room gets too warm because we have the heat on quite a bit.
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Background info:
We have a ranch style, one story, brick house over a crawl space, with an attached, two-car garage built on a concrete slab. The house has roughly 1,800 square feet and the garage room adds about 200 more square feet. The house is 45 years old. The garage room is 17 years old. The garage room is by far the tightest and best insulated room in the house.
We have added lots of insulation throughout the attic and put in energy efficient doors and windows throughout the house, including in the garage room.
Three years ago we had an HVAC dealer pull out all of our old HVAC equipment, including all the duct work. He then installed a new heat pump / gas furnace combo and a completely new duct system. Everything was sized to handle the main house plus the garage room – but it is a single zone system. The system has a multi-speed blower.
The heat pump is outside. The indoor coil, gas furnace, blower, filters and all the duct work are in the crawl space. I watched the installation and think they did a quality job.
Almost two years ago, we had a radon mitigation system installed in the crawl space. The crawl space ‘floor’ and lowest few inches of the crawl space walls are completely covered with a radon barrier. The system pulls air from under the barrier and exhausts it outside, above the roof line. This was also a quality installation and it has reduced the radon level inside the house dramatically.
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I have tried two ‘approaches’ to the garage room HVAC problem:
1. In the cold months, when the heater is on a lot, I put some dust filter cloth over the supply and return vents in the garage room to reduce the air flow without getting a whistling sound like what happens when you close the supply vent louvers. This helps some.
2. The past two weeks, I have tried running the blower in “circulate” mode. That gives us a slow blower speed, with an “on” cycle of about 35%. This approach does eliminate the stuffy-air problem, and even cools the room quite a bit.
But it seems to roughly double the rate at which humidity creeps back into the house each time the cooling shuts off.
During these past two weeks, it has been unusually humid outside, but not warm enough to make much use of the cooling. So, maybe this wasn’t the best time to be using this approach. Still, we live in the Southeast, so high humidity in the summer will always be a factor.
I haven’t tried the “circulate” mode in the really warm or really cold parts of the year, so I don't know what results it might produce then.
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Thanks in advance for your comments/suggestions.
John
My question is: how can I provide fresh air and comfortable temperature to a room that I built into our garage?
--------------------------------------------------
Specifically, we have two HVAC type problems in the garage room:
1. In the warm months, the air in the garage room gets too warm and stuffy. The room is so air-tight that it can’t breathe like the rest of the house. Also, we keep the indoor air in the main house at 79F, year-round, for health reasons. So, the system is not in cooling mode very often. Finally, the room is used for TV and computer activities, so there is a fair amount of heat generated in the room.
2. In the cold months, the garage room gets too warm because we have the heat on quite a bit.
--------------------------------------------------
Background info:
We have a ranch style, one story, brick house over a crawl space, with an attached, two-car garage built on a concrete slab. The house has roughly 1,800 square feet and the garage room adds about 200 more square feet. The house is 45 years old. The garage room is 17 years old. The garage room is by far the tightest and best insulated room in the house.
We have added lots of insulation throughout the attic and put in energy efficient doors and windows throughout the house, including in the garage room.
Three years ago we had an HVAC dealer pull out all of our old HVAC equipment, including all the duct work. He then installed a new heat pump / gas furnace combo and a completely new duct system. Everything was sized to handle the main house plus the garage room – but it is a single zone system. The system has a multi-speed blower.
The heat pump is outside. The indoor coil, gas furnace, blower, filters and all the duct work are in the crawl space. I watched the installation and think they did a quality job.
Almost two years ago, we had a radon mitigation system installed in the crawl space. The crawl space ‘floor’ and lowest few inches of the crawl space walls are completely covered with a radon barrier. The system pulls air from under the barrier and exhausts it outside, above the roof line. This was also a quality installation and it has reduced the radon level inside the house dramatically.
--------------------------------------------------
I have tried two ‘approaches’ to the garage room HVAC problem:
1. In the cold months, when the heater is on a lot, I put some dust filter cloth over the supply and return vents in the garage room to reduce the air flow without getting a whistling sound like what happens when you close the supply vent louvers. This helps some.
2. The past two weeks, I have tried running the blower in “circulate” mode. That gives us a slow blower speed, with an “on” cycle of about 35%. This approach does eliminate the stuffy-air problem, and even cools the room quite a bit.
But it seems to roughly double the rate at which humidity creeps back into the house each time the cooling shuts off.
During these past two weeks, it has been unusually humid outside, but not warm enough to make much use of the cooling. So, maybe this wasn’t the best time to be using this approach. Still, we live in the Southeast, so high humidity in the summer will always be a factor.
I haven’t tried the “circulate” mode in the really warm or really cold parts of the year, so I don't know what results it might produce then.
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Thanks in advance for your comments/suggestions.
John
