Closed vents in unused rooms
by June
(Kinston, NC, USA)
Is it more energy efficient to close the vents in rooms that aren't used on a regular basis and keep the doors closed?
Answer from Green Energy Efficient Homes
It is definitely better to close the vents in rooms you aren't using, and keep the doors closed, rather than fully heat or cool those rooms. There are a couple of things you do need to be aware of though.
First, you wouldn't want to close off any vents close to the main thermostat. For example if your thermostat is in your living room and you rarely use the living room, it's not a good idea to close off the living room and its vents, because the living room would stay cooler than other rooms in the house and the thermostat would never register that the heat is going up elsewhere in the house.
Second, you need to be careful about cutting heat to rooms where there is plumbing, at least during times of very cold whether. Although it's unlikely that weather in the -5C to 0C range (23F to 32F) would cause pipes to burst in one room that is unheated, if adjacent rooms are, the lower you go below that range, the more risky it is that the water in pipes in the unheated room may freeze and cause the pipes to burst.
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