Second-story laundry room is COLD!
We have a second-story laundry room that we are having issues with during the winter. Some backround: – House was built in 2006. It has 2×6 walls. -Laundry room is between two bedroom on the front (south side of the house. It is approximately 5’x10′. Half of it is below the entryway (inside the house) and the other hald extends outside (overhang). There is one single-hung window. A door can be closed to close-off the room. – During cold winter days the room get very cold (especially first thing in the morning when the heat hasn’t gone on yet….we lower our heat at night). The floor of the room (especially over the outside overhang) is very cold to the touch. We have also had issues with excessive moisture during the winer (I’m assuming a condensation issue with the cold air and the dryer). There are a coule of areas of blackish mildew on the drywall on corners. – There is one heater vent in the room (located on the ceiling) and no cold air return. – I have replaced the dryer original dryer vent with this: http://www.menards.com/main/heating-…r/dryer-vent-c losure/p-1461044-c-9502.htm It seems to have helped a bit as inside the dryer isn’t as cold before starting on cold days. – We did complain to the builder shortly after moving in and they did come out and pull off the overhand and check for insulation. It didn’t seem to help and they have gone bankrupt since. So I am wondering what I should do next. Should I pull off the sofitt and check for insulation (I don’t really trust the builder)? Check in the attic for proper insulation all the way out to the edge? Insulate better around the window (we have an issue with all the windows that I’ve posted about it a seperate thread. Pull of all the drywall on the outer-facing walls and check for proper insulation? Should I be concerned with the mildew? Should I remove the pieces of drywall where the mildew has started? Thanks in advance!
Replies
Do you mean http://www.menards.com/main/heating-cooling/venting/dryer/dryer-vent-closure/p-1461044-c-9502.htm ?
First thing I'd do is go in there on a slightly windy day and feel for air leaks. In fact, you might install a window fan elsewhere in the house to draw a vacuum and make the leaks more obvious. Sealing air leaks is tedious but generally more effective than adding insulation.
Similar experience
This is my second shot at posting a reply on this thread. The first seems to have disappeared into the ether.
At any rate, we have similar "architectural features" on our house. All of the closets across one long side of the house are cantilevered out. Always had cold floors in the closets and in the rooms near the closets. Since part of our basement is unfinished, it was easy to diagnose the problem. A lot of cold air was migrating from the cantilevered floor sections into the remainder of the house.
It took 35 years, but I finally got around to doing what you're thinking about. Pulled the soffit off , found missing and poorly installed insulation. Worst of all, there was no blocking between the floor joists under the main wall line. I think code now requires that blocking, but we had none.
I installed blocking. Foamed and caulked all the joints around it, then filled the overhanging floor cavities with foam insulation. Reinstalled the soffit, gluing & caulking the stink out of every single joint/seam.
It made an amazing, but predictable, difference in the comfort level of those rooms and the heat load on the house.
As DanH suggests, your trouble is more likely to be due to air leaks than insufficient insulation.
The mildew in drywalled corners could indicate an uninsulated channel where the interior wall meets the exterior wall. You might be able to insulate and air-seal this by injecting low-expanding foam thru a discreetly-drilled hole in the corner, which you could fill and paint later.
The mildew can be cleaned up with bleach-water, and it won't grow back so long as you don't allow favorable conditions for its growth. Could be some rot in the framing behind the drywall, however. You might be able to see about that thru the small hole I mentioned earlier by using a borescope.
Here are some pics of the laundry room, pics from outside, and pics of the sofit underneath the room. You can see the vent I installed on the dryer (curved, off white tube) and how the laundy room "bumps out about a foor on the left side and four feet or so on the right:
Your pics show that the laundry room has a lot of exterior exposure: floor, ceiling, 3 walls. Not only does this create a lot of potential for air leakage, the room will have a disproportionately large heat loss compared to its relatively small floor area.
On top of that, it's very likely that the heat duct in the ceiling delivers a very low airflow due to its remoteness from the furnace, and, that the air that does manage to get there has lost a lot of its heat because of being located in cold attic. As if that weren't enough, the fact that there is no return air path means that airflow will be greatly restricted whenever the door into the room is closed.
This space will work only if very careful attention were paid to air-sealing, insulating, and a designed HVAC system. Apparently, it has none of that.
Sorry.
Cold? Laundry room.
The first thing is, do you have a thermostat in
the room that controls its temperature?
If not, then you are wrongly expecting the room
to keep warm, when the house thermostat is off.
Which will not happen.
The second is, is the radiator in the room big
enough and capable enough to keep the room as
warm as you would like it to be? With its
current level of insulation?
The third is, there will always be a delay
between the boiler coming on in the morning and
the room reaching its desired temperature.
The initial cure is to fit a programable
thermostat in the laundry room, one where you
can set both the room temperature and the time
in the morning when it needs to come on to reach
the desired room temperature by the time you
want to go in there. This can only be arrived at
by trial and error.
Of course, you can always bring the main home
thermostat on earlier and run it at a higher
temperature to warm the laundry room.
You mention that the floor is very cold, have
you measured its temperature? The floor will
only be warm if you are putting the required
amount of heat in....no heat in, or little heat
in - the heat rises, warms the ceiling but not
the floor.
This is a laundry room, you are dealing with
damp things, damp things emit water vapor that
will always condense on any surface that is
cold, below the dew point of the room, the only
way to avoid condensation is to either raise the
room temperature to above dew point or open the
window to let the water vapor out. Water vapor
is programed by nature to head for the nearest
cold surface.
I would guess that you spend very little time in
your laundry room. I would also guess that your
builder takes it for granted that you would
prefer to have a cold laundry room rather than
higher heating bills?
I keep both of our freezers in our
laundry/utility room, I am very happy when I go
in there and find the temperature is below 40 as
this is keeping my freezing costs down, popping
on a coat for a few minutes is no problem.
Do you really want to spend a lot of time and
money on a room that is used so rarely?
I assume you must be posting from your pad, and you insert a "return" on every line to "fold" the lines so you can read them. But it makes your posts unreadable by everyone else.
Go down to the bottom right corner of the text entry box and "grab" the little triangle and "drag" it left. This will narrow the text entry window and "fold" your lines without the need to do "return" after every line.
And what good do you expect a thermostat to do on an unzoned forced air system?
Sophisticated heating
Because I do my own design and installation I rather expect other people to have the same level of heating and cooling sophistication. I believe in lots of insulation, 8 inches of polyurethane in the ceilings, 6 inches of polystyrene in the floors and zoned heating/underfloor heating, where I can prescribe the exact temperature for each room or part of a room.
If you have a simple uncontrolled system and waste heat and at the same time have a cold room/home, then change the heating and cooling and install a level of insulation that works.
At a simple level, adding a room thermostat to a cold room will turn the whole system on and warm all the rooms. It makes sense to have the master thermostat in your coldest living room.
At the very least have a thermostat in the bathroom.
Is there any point in spending money on heating a room that will only be used for a few minutes?
second-story laundry room
I can almost guarantee that the porch ceiling is not airtight. Needs to be sealed properly.air is just blowing rihgt down the joist bays negating all insulation.