Hypermiling the furnace

[Mendel Leisk]

Well, there's quite a large volume of air down there, I'd hazard a guess at 20% of the house's total air volume. Previously it was basically at the same temperature as the rest of the house, due both to vicarious heating through the thin sheet metal walls of the ductwork and the abundance of air avenues between the two air spaces. Now the crawl space heating is more controlled. So far I've left the 2 outlets down there almost tight shut. The temperature difference is still not much, maybe 2~3 degrees centigrade. I've thought a bit about insulating the underside of floor, but think I'll leave it as is for now.

And the air coming out of the registers gets upwards of 10 degrees centigrade hotter now, so that's got to be good.


One thing I've got in back-of-mind: this duct insulation would also help if we were to upgrade our furnace to a system with air conditioning.

[jcp123]

Hypermiling the furnace? I live an an attached home (duplex), and have had the HVAC swystem turned off for the last couple of days. My wife even had opened the patio doors for about an hour and a half last night and it is still quite cozy this morning. Temps have hung out around 60 or below the last few days, not hugely cold but enough that I would have thought that we would turn on the heating side of the central air by now. Either the place is well-insulated (which I think is the case, the college parties on the block are scarecely audible, plus opening and closing a door seems to cause a great change in air pressures throughout the home), and/or we are receiving a lot of heat from the neighboring unit.