Our house has one upstairs room, a converted bonus room that I claimed as my “man cave” when we bought the house. The room has one air conditioner vent and one return vent as well as a ceiling fan. I figured the room might get hot due to all the computers and gaming equipment I have, but this summer it’s been unbearable.
As your head begins to enter the room’s air space while climbing the stairs you can feel yourself stepping into the heat, not unlike climbing into the attic. The air conditioner return vent is at the top of the stairs, which makes me think the cool air from downstairs is getting pulled up the stairs and completely bypassing the room. The A/C blowing vent is in the ceiling, directly above the ceiling fan. I’ve tried the ceiling fan on “push” (the try and spread the vent’s cold air around the room) as well as “pull” (to try and pull the cold air from the stairs into the room) but neither one works. I’ve also placed a box fan at the top of the stairs — again, I’ve tried blowing the cold air into the room from the stairs, and blowing the hot air out into the return vent; can’t tell a difference. The only thing that seems to do any good at all is opening the upstairs window and blowing hot air out of the room with a fan. This gets the room down to around 80 degrees … and adds about $75 on to my monthly electric bill.
When we moved into the house we had the home inspector look at the room (it was hot then, too) and he said it looked fine. In fact, our house has a larger than normal air conditioning unit which should be able to handle the bonus room just fine. But it doesn’t.
The only other solution I’ve come up with is adding a window air conditioner unit to the upstairs. I hate to do this for a couple of reasons. One, the room’s window faces the street and I think it looks kind of ghetto to have a window unit hanging out over our front door. And two, I watch a lot of movies upstairs and I think the sound of the air conditioner running up there constantly would bug me. Of course, at least I would go up there more often if it were cooler …
Man I wanna move.