INTRODUCTION

Hi my name is Julianna. I’ve always thought that my room is the coldest but my parents say the whole house should be the same. I want to know if my room is colder or if our whole house is truly all the same.  Also, if my room is colder, I want to see if there is anything I can change to make my room feel warmer.

HYPOTHESIS

My hypothesis is that my room will be the coldest because when I wake up and go to the washroom, the washroom feels warmer than my room.  I think the reason it is cold is because my room is far away from the furnace and my warm air register does not feel as powerful as some of the vents on the main floor right above the furnace

RESEARCH

Our house is heated using a furnace that is located in the basement.  The furnace burns natural gas which is used to heat up the air.  The air is then blown through the house using ducts that are connected to the heating vents in each room.  There is also a cold air return opening that sucks air back into the furnace to create a cycle.  

In my house there is a warm air register in each bedroom and bathroom. There are 2 warm air registers in the kitchen, 2 in the living room, 1 in the front hall and 1 in the upstairs loft.  Each bedroom has a cold air return to keep circulation when the doors are closed and there is one more return air in the dining room.  In total there are 12 warm air registers and 5 cold air return registers in my house.

My bedroom is located upstairs.  Upstairs there are 2 bedrooms, a loft and a bathroom.  Because our house is a 1.5 storey house, the roof is very slanted and I have 3 walls and my ceiling that are exposed to the attic or are exterior walls.

VARIABLES

Independent Variable: How heat vents and doors are opened and closed

Dependent Variable: How fast my room heats and cools

Controlled Variable: time between thermometer readings, location of the thermometers in each room, time of day

PROCEDURE

Materials Needed:

• Notebook to record data
• Thermometers
• Cardboard
• Plexiglass
• Hot glue gun
• Hair dryer to simulate heat
• Plastic tubes to distribute the heat

Procedure:

1. Put thermometers in each room of the house near the center of the room at table height
2. Turn of the heat and open all windows in the house to cool down the inside and all rooms
3. Measure the temperature in all rooms every 5 minutes for 15 minutes
4. Turn the heat on 24 degrees celsius for the entire house
5. Measure the temperature every 5 minutes for 35 minutes
6. Turn the heat off
7. Measure the temperature every 30 minutes for one hour
8. After reviewing the results we will test our solutions on a model of my house
9. Run multiple tests of different scenarios to see if I can warm room better

OBSERVATIONS

ANAYLSIS

My first test is to cool down the house by turning off the heat and opening all the windows.  After the house has cooled down, I turned on the heat and recorded the temperature in all the rooms to see how they rise and fall after the heat is turned back off.

TEST 1 - This was our first test. I was surprised at how fast my room temperature increased. It increased the most and actually decreased the least.

TEST 2 - When looking at the results from the second test my room did increase quickly but it also decreased the fastest of all the rooms.

TEST 3 - When looking at the results from the third test my room did increase quickly but it also decreased second fastest.  Only the other upstairs bedroom decreased faster.

When I look at the all of the test results, overall, upstairs heated up the fastest which surprised me. I think this is because hot air rises and goes from the main floor rising up the stairs.  In the 2nd and 3rd tests my room cooled down the fastest. I didn’t know why and then I realized that the main difference between the 1st test and the other 2 tests was the outside temperature.  The day of the first test was a very warm day in February.  I had placed a thermometer on the deck in my backyard and in the sun the thermometer showed 20 degrees celsius. On the other 2 test days the temperature was below zero.  My room is the only room in the house that has a south facing window so I think the outside sun and temperature kept my room from cooling down on the 1st day.  On cold days both upstairs bedrooms cooled the most.

My first thought at the start of this experiment was that the heater in my room didn’t work as well because my room is cold at night. After running the tests, it seems like the heater in my room worked but my room is still cold.  

In the summer, my room always feels the hottest.  Because of these observations I think that my room may not have good enough insulation.   This makes sense because my room has 3 walls that are exterior walls of the house.  This is the same as the other bedroom upstairs.

CONCLUSION

In a house, the furnace and heating system should be set up to heat all rooms evenly.  In the summer my room is always hot and in the winter my room is always cold.  After running my tests, I think that my room does get enough heat from the furnace. 

If my room is cold in the morning it means that the amount of hot air going into my room is not enough to keep it warm compared to the cold coming in through the walls. Here are some things that could help my room stay warm.

1. Change the insulation in the attic and walls - This is not really something I can do on my own although this might be the best solution
2. Increase the amount of hot air coming into my room - I may be able to do this by covering some vents in rooms that don’t need as much heat during the night which will increase the amount of air for my room.
3. Decrease the temperature around the thermostat - because the thermostat is in the middle of the main floor it stays very warm always and if the thermostat thinks it is still warm enough, the furnace will not turn on even if my room is cold.

I have conducted an additional experiment to see what I can do to keep my room warmer. You can read about these tests in the Application portion of my report.

Since trying to add insulation in the walls and attic is expensive and not something I can do by myself I tried to decrease the heat around the thermostat and increase the amount of air coming through my room’s warm air register.  By covering some vents in the rooms we don’t use at night, like the kitchen and living room, it increases the presure in the open vents including my room.  By closing the bedroom doors on the main floor it keeps the hot air in the rooms from shutting off the thermostat.  I could not cover all the other vents in the house or the furnace would run too long and my room would overheat like in run #7 of my model testing.

Here are my final solutions to the problem of my room being too cold.

With my parents' permission, I have been covering up the vents in the rooms that don’t need to be heated at night and so far I am pleasantly pleased with my room feeling noticeably warmer when I wake up in the morning.  My sister who also has an upstairs room has noticed a difference as well.  Next Step: How to keep my room cool in the summer!  

APPLICATION

HOW TO FIX MY ROOM’S TEMPERATURE 

Now we know that my room can warm up quickly, we need to brainstorm what we can do to make sure my room is warm overnight.  

In order to test the 3 ideas I had to help keep the temperature warmer in my room my dad helped me build a small version of my house that I can heat up using a blow dryer.  With this model house, I will test many different ways to cover vents and open and close doors to see which way will help get my room the hottest before the thermostat reaches a temperature to turn off the furnace.

I choose to build and use a model because it uses a lot of time and energy to heat up and cool down my whole house.  When I come to a conclusion using the model house I will do one more test of my house to see if my room is warmer.  I also need to make sure that other people in my house are comfortable as well.  If I cover all the vents in the house I will surely be warm but everyone else will be cold.  At each step I will add something new that should decrease the heat near the thermostat.  To cover vents, I will plug the vent in my model and to close a door I will plug the door opening in the model.

After running these tests on the model house  I think the best idea might be to replicate Run # 6 in my house.  To do this I will need to cover the vents in the kitchen, main floor bathroom, hall  and close the bedroom doors on the main floor.  Here are the real results from this final test. 

SOURCES OF ERROR

1. Thermometers might not all be completely accurate but we did buy them all in one package and they are the same type and digital
2. I can not read all the thermometers at the same time so some rooms may heat up long but I always went in the same order so If I started reading after 5 minutes it should be 5 minutes or close to between all rooms
3. Outside Temperature.  We can not control the outside temperature which may give different results
4. When using the model, the rooms might not be to exact scale
5. My model does not have the same insulation as our house
6. My model does not have a basement
7. My model uses a hair dryer as a furnace which works similar but different from a furnace

Photo Citation

HomeTips. (2021, January 26). Central air conditioners. Retrieved from https://www.hometips.com/how-it-works/central-air-conditioners.html

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Thank you Mr. Thompson for helping me get organized and stay on track for my project.

Thank you to my family for letting me heat up and cool down the house when they are home, it was quite uncomfortable sometimes.

Thank you to my Dad for helping me cut the pieces for my model house and for guiding me while building the model and for showing me how to make graphs with the numbers in the spreadsheets.

Thank you to my older sisters for helping remind me of the deadlines for the science fair because I couldn’t always go to the lunch time meetings.

Thank you to my mom for helping me with the computer technology parts of my project. I am really slow at typing and entering in numbers and there were A LOT of numbers to enter in.