Do you suffer from a hot upstairs in summer? Read on for an effective way to beat the heat and make your upstairs bedrooms cooler.
As summer heat comes on each year, I always get questions like this one: “Why are my upstairs bedrooms so hot in summer? Even with the central A/C running I can’t sleep. I hate paying to have the basement and first floor freezing while I’m sweating upstairs.”
Second-level rooms often get overheated in summer because of the design of forced-air heating systems that the central air connects to. Forced-air furnace systems include louvred floor registers that are located to deliver heated air in winter, not cooled air in summer.
Bubble of hot air
Ducts can’t be changed and, while this sounds like bad news, there is another solution that works well in getting rid of that bubble of upstairs hot air that’s making you miserable. It all comes down to openable skylights.
Many are astonished at how much better central air conditioning works when a few openable skylights are installed in second-storey ceilings. In fact, openable skylights make any home much cooler, even if you don’t have air conditioning turned on at all.
By opening the skylights just an inch or so during the day, hot air is allowed to leave your home from the top, making room for cooled air from your central air conditioner to rise up and cool overheated upstairs spaces. I know it sounds strange, but opening skylights actually helps A/C work better.
This video, which is part of a cabin-building course, shows how skylights help cool upstairs rooms better than anything else:
What about when it rains?
Many skylights can open, but the best are electrically operated models that automatically open and close on a schedule, and close quickly on their own when it starts to rain. What’s the point in having cooler upstairs rooms if your floor is wet when you come back from work?
The trouble with most electrically operated skylights is that it’s very disruptive to string wires to them in a retrofit situation. That’s one reason I like solar skylights. They don’t require wires to deliver power, but draw power from on-board batteries kept charged by photovoltaic cells built right in.
I’ve installed solar skylights myself and live with them, and they work perfectly. Just pop them in like standard skylights and enjoy electric operation with automatic rain closure. You can even open solar skylights during power failures, cooling your home when air conditioning can’t operate.
VELUX is currently the only company that makes solar-powered skylights that I know of, and I’ve never seen anything as good as the models they provide. Their solar power system also includes solar-powered blinds that can operate using a touch remote or on a schedule.
Blinds are especially useful for summer cooling action because they block out sun while the skylight is open and ventilating. It’s also pretty nice to wake up to a gently opening blind in the summer, rather than the blare of a clock radio.
“My air conditioning finally works!”
This is the kind of good news I usually hear from people who get openable skylights installed, but in my experience the benefits of skylights go beyond just air conditioning that finally works upstairs. Top-of-house ventilation means you won’t need air conditioning nearly as often as before.
Open up the skylights remotely from any part of the house and you’ll immediately feel the breeze flowing through all rooms through opened windows. Your house will cool off much faster at night when all the hot air can escape through the roof.
Add to this the emotional benefit of much more natural light indoors, and you’ll begin to see why I like skylights so much.
This video shows me installing a modern VELUX solar skylight, and how automatic rain closure works in action:
