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Heating & Air Conditioning

Fresh air intake venting is oh so cold.

13 years ago

My family and I live in MN. Every winter I have dealt with issues of cold air coming from all areas of our 1955 home with a 3 year old addition with in-floor heat. I finally installed a fresh intake vent that has halted any cold air coming from other areas of the old part of the house.

With all of our gas appliances and vent fans I calculated an 8 inch size vent. The problem is all that cold air is really pouring out of there and I bought a plastic tub that sits right behind the new boiler but the floor in the laundry room is so cold and it spills out into the rest of the basement.

I temporarily placed salt bags for our softener into the opening of the doorway of the utility room to prevent it from coming into the rest of the basement with little success. I didn't think it would get that cold. I even used the R-10 insulated flex tubing for ducting the fresh air which works great except for the air not staying in the tub.

Before I put this venting in and we had our old boiler, which was 30 some years old, our CO2 alarm went off 2 times in 10 years but I didnÃ¯Â¿Â½t think it was such a big concern with the cold air pouring into the older portion of our house from everywhere. I finally decided to get a new boiler and the fresh air intake.

Is there anything I can do to keep this cold air at bay?

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Comment (1)

dave120
Original Author
13 years ago
Thanks for the information, I will have to try that. A co-worker of mine bought a house and he said his fresh air intake was shaped like a "J". When we added on to our house we re-insulated everywhere adding all new windows and doors and our gas fireplace is a sealed system using 2 wall ducting.

With all we have done to insulate our home and the fact that my new Buderus boiler has an automatic vent damper there should not be any warm air escaping. I guess we will see once I shape my flex duct into a P type trap. Thanks again.
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