Temperature inversion
Well, turns out doing a bunch of home “tightening” has some interesting effects on the climate in the house (and helped locate a few external leaks that were missed). My house is what’s called a tri-level. That is you enter on the main floor which has all the common living spaces, and can go up or down a half-flight of stairs to the bedrooms / office area or to the media room. Well, the rooms that used to be cold (defying logic and physics) were the upstairs (warm air is supposed to rise, right?) are now the warm rooms, and vice versa. So now the office and bedrooms upstairs are almost uncomfortably warm when the downstairs rooms are at a comfy 68°F. Turns out that the thermostat in our house is located near the stairs, but on the main floor. So, the main floor follows all the rules and seems cold when you walk down to it.
Sounds like it’s time to revisit the air return ducts (one at the top of the stairs and one downstairs in the media room) to see if they can be tweaked to move the right air at the right time. Or, time to figure out how to tweak the thermostat so it does the right thing. And no, my house is too small to have multiple zones (trust me, it’s small for the area, and small in general).
By the way, those external leaks were places where the old cable TV lines were pulled into rooms, but the siding wasn’t replaced during remodels we’ve been doing. There was an actual paper-moving draft in my kitchen a few days ago coming from between two upper cabinets. Yup, there was a hole on the outside wall right behind that. I still don’t know where the path is, but plugging the source helped.
