每日家庭整修技巧

Today’s home renovation tip relates to a problem we are having in the winter in our daughter’s bathroom on the main floor. It is too warm…..really warm. Even though we have the register closed, lots and lots of hot air comes through from the furnace.

We discovered the main reason for this; namely, there is no inline damper, that round metalic piece, in the duct line from the furnace to the room. Usually in heating ducts, the inline damper will be reachable from just inside the heating vent once you remove the register / vent cover. This is to allow one to control the flow of air coming from the furnace (or in the summer the air conditioner); to reduce the flow of air one simply flips the inline damper to an almost closed postion. Without this, closing the register (the vent cover on the floor) will not be nearly as effective.

A few experts gave me the longer term, expensive, time consuming solution, including installing the inline damper. However, to do this you need access to the outside of the duct, which was not possible in this situation.

So, yesterday I went to the friendly, neighbourhood big box store and purchased a magnetic vent cover / vent blocker. Most of the these are a simply white, but this one has the imprint / picture of a heat register so one would not even notice that it was a vent cover. These are a simply piece of flexible magnetic strip on one side and, in our case, a picture of a nice gold heat vent on the other. All you need to do is to place it on top of the metallic register and it stays there. So, when the furnace is on, no air comes through. Amazing.

Her bathroom is no longer way too warm. In the summer we plan to place one on top of the ceiling vent in the basement bedroom to prevent cold air from the air conditioner coming into that room as we have had complaints by it’s part time resident to this effect.

It cost all of $4.97, plus taxes, for a pair; wow! It took all of 45 seconds to install; wow! The appreciation of my wife, priceless.