As you’re reading this blog, are you sitting comfortably – all warm and cozy – in your favorite room, while elsewhere in your home you might need an extra sweater, slippers, and hand warmers to help prevent frost bite?

Voila, hot and cold spots! A common condition when you have an older heating system, especially one that has not been faithfully and properly maintained over the years.

Still, there are other things that could be causing hot and cold spots that are much easier and more affordable to rectify. Here are a few examples:

Dirty ducts. If you have a forced air heating system and haven’t had your ducts cleaned in four years or longer, there could be enough dust and dirt inside them to restrict air flow and thus help create hot and cold spots. The condition of your ducts can be checked with a special camera before you commit to having them cleaned.

Blocked registers, vents, or radiators. Let’s say, for example, that you have baseboard heating and your family room sofa lines up squarely in front of that room’s heating unit. In that instance, you can have hot and cold spots in the same room, never mind from one room to the next! If you want your baseboard units, vents, etc., to distribute the heat evenly, give them plenty of room to do so.

How’s your insulation holding up? If your attic insulation “ain’t what it used to be,” heat could be working its way through what’s left of it, into the attic, and out through the roof. And that helps nobody, not even the birds.

Are there areas in your home where insulation could and should be added? If the colder rooms in your home are coldest near walls that face outdoors, and those walls have no internal insulation, the problem isn’t with your heating system. Cold air could also be entering your living spaces through wall sockets and switches. These can be insulated, too.

Before jumping to conclusions, we invite you to contact Optimum Air for our heating system preventive maintenance service. That alone could be enough to provide a steady and consistent supply of heat from one room to the next. If not, we’ll pinpoint the source of the problem and give you a guaranteed upfront price quote to fix it. At Optimum Air, it’s all part of the service.