There is nothing more frustrating than having every room in your house nice and cool—except one. There’s that one room that won’t get cool, no matter what you do. This might not even be a west-facing room. You’ve checked the vent and there doesn’t seem to be anything blocking it.
No matter how high you crank up your AC, there just doesn’t seem to be any air coming out of certain vents. How can you figure out what is causing this issue and solve it? Here’s what you need to know:
1. Make sure the damper is actually open.
Most vents have a switch or toggle on them that open and close a damper just inside the vent, allowing you to manually open or close that vent if you need to. You might accidentally close this damper when cleaning the vent or simply have never opened that damper at any point. The very first thing you should do when you start to notice that there is no air coming out of a vent in your home is to try to open or close the damper, just to make sure that it is working.
2. Track the distance between this vent and your AC unit.
If the rooms in your home that are getting no air are the farthest away from your unit, you can attribute a lack of air flow to an under powered or overpowered unit. An under-powered unit simply will not have enough strength to push the cooled air into every corner of your home. The overpowered unit will have enough power, but it probably will never run long enough to actually push the air to the rooms that are the furthest away from the unit.
Overpowered units will very easily cool the rooms very close to the AC and will switch off before their fan has actually delivered that same amount of cooling to the other rooms.
3. Clean your air ducts.
Even if you look into the air vent and can’t see any obstructions, there might be very real obstructions out of sight, somewhere else in your vents. If this is the case, you need to have your air ducts thoroughly cleaned. The best way to do this is to hire a company with experience cleaning ducts, so you can be sure, when they are finished, that you will be able to get air into rooms where there currently is no air flow.
4. Have your system checked.
There might be an issue not with your ducts or with the setup of your system, but with the system itself. A malfunctioning AC unit may not be able to push air into some rooms of your home.
One of the most common issues is a clogged air filter. Some cool air might be pushed to some of the rooms in your home, but your system will be working overtime to do even that little bit of cooling. Have a professional HVAC company check your unit to see if this or another similar issue is the root cause of your problem.
5. Have your ducts checked.
If you’ve completed all of the other steps and there are rooms in your house that are still not getting air through the vents, you might have a leaky or even disconnected duct. This is another job for a professional air conditioning company that will be able to locate and repair the issue quickly and affordably.
