Why You Should Open All Your Vents

The best reason to open your vents is to help your heating and cooling systems last longer. Keeping your vents open prevents overheating and freezing in your furnace and air conditioner. Moving furniture a couple inches away from vents also makes a big difference.

On the flip side, when you close your vents, it creates excess pressure in the ductwork and the furnace. For the system to function well, the motors would have to work many times harder than normal when they’re closed.

Whether your vents are open or closed, your heating and cooling system will try to move the amount of air it was designed to. Some people think closing vents will save them money because they won’t be heating or cooling rooms they don’t use. But the opposite is true.

By closing the vents, you’re not only not saving money, you’re spending more money. That's because it's shortening the life of key components and the overall life of the system.

Here is the basic concept of a heating and cooling system: Air goes into your return vents and comes out your supply vents. When air can travel freely in and out of your system, the temperature in your home is more even, which reduces hot and cold spots.

If vents or doors block the circulation of air, those rooms cannot change temperature at the same rate. Closed vents mean big temperature changes from room to room.

The ductwork in your house is like a tree. The trunk of the tree is the air handler, furnace and evaporator coil. The large return air vents are the roots, drawing air into the system to fuel the trunk. The supply vents are the branches, where the trunk is pushing air out to the house and making your home feel nice.

Some people think that closing vents will direct more air into other rooms, but because the branches are not connected to each other at the ends, this logic doesn’t work. Closing vents only suffocates the system and costs you money, since you’ll have to replace the heating and cooling system sooner.